(no subject)

[skygiants]

OK, so I spent two hours standing outside on a volunteer shift with "It's Over" stuck on loop in my head, and then allchildren suggested that this episode might be foreshadowing Rose's return, which has led to the following over-analysis:

war and glory reinvention fusion freedom her attention
out in daylight my potential bold precise experimental

I'm not adding punctuation because I kind of like the mess of words/concepts, which could mean a whole bunch of different things; ‘this is a list of things that have happened to Pearl’ / ‘this is a list of things that Pearl was or believed she was fighting for’ / ‘this is a list of things that Pearl is still fighting for’ all have very different (though not mutually exclusive) implications

but then

who am I now in the world without her
petty and dull with the nerve to doubt her

is INCREDIBLY interesting, because while Pearl obviously seems to be thinking ‘the nerve’ as in ‘the UNMITIGATED GALL,’ boldness, we already know, is one of the things that Pearl has gained/fought for/is fighting for

SO

now I am suddenly desperately hoping for an arc in which Rose does return, and Pearl (and Garnet and Amethyst, but especially Pearl) finds, to her horror, that she has grown past the point where she can unquestioningly follow Rose; suddenly she's doubting Rose, and defying Rose, and maybe getting into enormous fights with Rose??

If we're very lucky, this will happen in song!

Comments

[aquamirage]

yessssssssssss I like this idea

the more we find out about Rose being fallible and kind of a jerk, the more interested I become in Rose

[skygiants]

SAME. like, if Rose comes back, I don't want it all to fall in line with her brilliant long game, I want her to have completely misjudged everyone's reactions, I want it to be a huge mess *____*

[kate_nepveu]

. . . oh hey, I really don't want Rose to come back. Learn something new every day.

But yes, if she does, I think that is inevitable.

[skygiants]

I did not want it at all before, but suddenly I have talked myself into thinking it's important for Pearl's arc and now my feelings have done a 180.

[kate_nepveu]

I think I'll stick with daydreaming other ways Pearl might reject Rose's judgment after the fact, because turns out I feel extremely strongly that Rose being gone needs to be irrevocable!

[allchildren]

IF Rose were to return, I don't think it could ever be more than very temporary, since she gave her gem to Steven. They can't coexist, and he is the future in a way that I think is very intentional on her part.

>>> "Steven, we can't both exist. I'm going to become half of you. And I need you to know that every moment you love being yourself, that's me, loving you and loving being you. Because you're going to be something extraordinary. You're going to be a human being."

So she might be conjured in a magic vision or Lion's mane or Steven might temporarily give up his gem, but I don't think she could ever stay, nor would she want to.

That being said, may I direct Becca's attention to this comment on the SU subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/stevenuniverse/comments/4to3mu/episode_discussion_mr_greg/d5izrcb

Also, "out in daylight" is such a punch to the queer gut. DAMN, THIS SHOW.

[aamcnamara]

I have a pet theory that Lion is in fact the half of Rose that didn't get passed along to Steven, at least in some metaphysical sense.

[allchildren]

She said she was going to be half of Steven, not that he would be half of her; so I'm not at all sure that there is another half of Rose that wasn't passed to him. But Lion is definitely involved with Rose somehow!

[skygiants]

Personal canon until proven otherwise: Lion is the personification of Rose's feelings of enigmatic smugness. This, and only this.

[skygiants]

Thank you for that link!! Yeah, I was really struck by how much this song as sad as it is, is a HUGE point of growth from past episodes centering on Pearl's feelings about Rose. There is so much self-awareness in it! Not once in that episode did we get that awkward 'I'm fine everything's fine EVERYTHING'S FINE' laugh! SHE KNOWS IT'S NOT FINE.

(and, my god, yes)

[batyatoon]

THIS EPISODE, MAN

I don't know how I feel about Rose Quartz actually coming back in any fashion, but I do love the idea of Pearl realizing she has reached the point of being able to disagree and argue with her.

[skygiants]

Honestly, it's kind of a mark of how good the writing on SU is, and the length of the character arc, that it didn't even strike me that that was the key end point until this episode. Because, like, obviously, and yet!

[gogollescent]

YEAH I ... love the idea of Rose Quartz coming back specifically to be exorcised, to be honest. I mean. Not. Not necessarily that. But I keep thinking about the echoes of quartzmom POV that insinuate themselves in this episode, with Steven's song, etc., and I had been viewing them as largely limited to the first half, while Steven in the car on the way back to Beach City is like, finally a kid again: wondering at and a little afraid of the new calm. Except now I'm like, maybe there's a bit of Rose in that, too. It's over, isn't it. maybe don't fake your death on ALL YOUR SPOUSES, even the ones with no concept of death

[skygiants]

IT'S OVER, ISN'T IT, yes! The idea of Rose ... merrily arranging thing for people and then belatedly having to cope with what that means, and the fact that she's really not needed any more. She's had her multiple thousands of years of being everyone's collective quartzspouse and/or quartzmom in a holding pattern, and now it's not just Steven growing up, everyone else is too.

[sapote]

Rose is such a First Girlfriend, isn't she? Like, the junior to Pearl's closeted college freshman, who Pearl was sure had all the answers to the question of how to be in the world. And Pearl thought all the magnificent things she found out about herself while she was with Rose somehow belonged to Rose, not to herself.

There was a thing somewhere on tumblr about how you could easily write an AU where Rose was the organizer of the queer zine collective on campus, and Pearl came to college, started dating Rose, came out to her parents, and stopped going home for Thanksgiving. And then a Bad Communication Poly Meltdown, and the best thing for Pearl to do in a human AU would probably be to move to a new town where all of her friends weren't also Rose's friends, but in canon that would be terrible military strategy.

[skygiants]

Oh man, ONE HUNDRED PERCENT a First Girlfriend. The AU really does pretty much write itself.