Featured@Rose
I have been wondering about her for a while, and I have a theory. I agree that Rose is more of a mastermind than she first appears, but the explanations leave some questions open:
1) How did Rose know that the Homeworld gems would use disruption technology?
2) If Rose knew about this technology, then why do the Crystal Gems not use it?
3) If the Homeworld gems have this tech, then how did she overcome it in the war?
I have a theory which answers these questions, while also explaining some other mysteries in the show. To explain it, we should first look at this image:
This is clearly an image of Rose casting some kind of energy attack against one of the diamonds – who we can infer was the leader of the Homeworld gem forces during the war. Around Rose are several figures who we can interpret to be the Crystal Gem forces. As Pearl said in “Rose’s Scabbard,” Rose was able to protect a small number of her friends using her shield powers.
So what did this power do? Here is what I believe: Rose was using a crude form of gem disruption technology, which she invented/perfected and then deployed to great effect against the Homeworld gems as a last resort during the war.
To explain why I believe this, let us look at what gem disruptors actually do and how they work. We know that gem bodies are just projections, and that in order to kill a gem you must destroy the gemstone embedded in their body. We also know that damage to the stone can physically impair the gem in various ways – as we saw with both Amethyst and Lapis.
What else do we know about damaged gems? We know that the monsters fought for the duration of the series are gems who have been corrupted (how? I’ll get to that), and that the Crystal Gems have been hoarding them until they can figure out ways to fix them. This has been going on since at least just before Rose met Greg (since we saw Garnet bubbling two stones during the episode). It is also possible to infer that these gems are corrupted in a way that goes beyond mere physical damage, since Rose’s healing magic has been shown to easily fix cracked gems. Their corruption is far more fundamental than that. We also know that it is likely that the identities of some of these gems are probably known – as indicated by the bit of bismuth bubbled in the secret room in Lion’s mane.
So then where did these corrupted gems come from? My theory is that Rose’s final attack created them – that they are the remnants of the Homeworld gem army and the Crystal Gems who were not protected.
The chain of events: Rose knows that she is going to have to fight the Homeworld gems to protect the earth, but that she is likely to fail in direct combat. But Rose is a genius, and is also willing to make tactical sacrifices to serve the greater good. She develops a bomb that releases gem disruption energy – effectively a very crude version of the disruptors we saw Jasper and Peridot use. The Homeworld gems do not have this technology at all: the strawberry battlefield is littered with the kinds of melee weapons we see the gems commonly wielding, but not a single object identifiable as a disruptor. So Rose engages the army, fights them and, seeing that she is about to be overwhelmed, pulls whomever she can save into her bubble and then detonates the bomb, wiping out the army and littering the field with the corrupted gemstones of her friends and enemies. The earth is saved, but at a terrible price.
This brings me to a telling bit of information we can infer from Jasper:
1) She was a survivor of the war, so the Homeworld gems were not completely wiped out, and presumably learned what Rose was capable of after the fight.
2) Jasper “respected” Rose’s tactics. This is rather damning praise: Jasper is the most aggressive and violent gem we have encountered so far, seemingly the opposite of Rose in terms of personality. What would Rose have to do to earn Jasper’s respect? Detonating the equivalent of a nuclear warhead seems about right.
Why I do not think that Rose manipulated Greg in “Story for Steven”
Rose has some saving graces here, and they stem at first from a single fact: it is clear from the costume changes that all of Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl received mortal wounds at some point after Greg met them, since all of them have different costumes in that episode. Rose, however, seems to have the same costume in both that episode and the video she made for Steven. So obviously some disaster happened from which Rose was spared.
What do I think it was? Well, remember that probe in “Laser Light Canon”? The one that, in retrospect, was clearly a Homeworld scout? What if that wasn’t the first time the Homeworld gems showed an interest in the earth again? What if the first time they did was after the meeting with Greg?
My speculation: for about 5,000 years Rose seems to have done nothing to prepare for the possibility of the Homeworld return. Then, all at once, she has to sacrifice herself in order to execute what is, admittedly, a pretty risky plan: creating someone with powers that the gems have never seen before, but who also is too young to properly use them. This looks like a plan that was thrown together quickly. And if her plan had always been to manipulate some guy into having a kid with her, she had all of five millennia to pick someone out. Using Greg seems more opportunistic than anything else.
So what I think happened is, Rose thought that the Homeworld was basically done with Earth after the war, and so she and the other Crystal Gems just contented themselves with figuring out a way to fix the corruption of the gems they found. Then, sometime after “Story for Steven” takes place, the Homeworld sends some kind of scouting robot, which catches the gems by surprise and uses gem disruption technology – now with about 5,000 years of technological advancement – to wipe out Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl. Rose, protected with her shield, was able to defeat it, but was forced to recognize the unthinkable: the Homeworld gems were preparing to attack the earth again, this time using technology that she herself had invented, but refined to a point beyond anything she could imagine. If she did not do something soon, she knew, the earth would be defenceless.
So she turns to Greg. She knows that, just like in the war, her best chance is to create something that the enemy has never seen before, and then use it to disrupt their plans and scatter them. Since Greg is the only human that she trusts enough, she uses him to create the first ever gem-human hybrid, a being with all of her powers that would also be immune to disruption technology. She has to do it quickly, so that the kid would have time to grow up and gain experience. It might well be that the deed had been done before the other Crystal Gems had revived from the attack, so that they woke up to find that Rose was suddenly gone.
But the plan worked brilliantly. There has not been an instance yet in which Steven did not manifest one of Rose’s powers: he has the shield, he can fuse, he can heal people, he can access Lion’s mane, he can transform himself. All he lacks is experience and training. And he can do things that Rose never could. For if he had not been able to overcome the disruption-based force fields, “Jailbreak” would have gone a lot differently.
So that is my theory: Rose is a tactical mastermind, but she is also deeply humane. She fully understands the implications of her actions, and feels true and genuine love for Greg, the Crystal Gems, Steven, and life on earth. And while she has sacrificed others to achieve victory, she has also sacrificed herself. Because she is motivated not by a capricious disregard, but by the recognition that sometimes a little death is the price of preserving life.
And so that is my theory: Steven was created on short notice, with a man she loved already, and in response to a threat that she herself helped create. Rose is a tactical genius, but one without a trace of Machiavellianism. I do not doubt at all that she felt the pain of all those deaths up to the final moments of her life.
