#and the last two is them having horrifyingly sad implications just for them to double down on the harm they’re causing

[starryrock]

So funny how I absolutely love villains/characters that are just genuinely fucked up. They have almost no redeeming qualities, they get limited screentime, they’re brutally stubborn in their ways, they hate everyone, they will throw others under the bus, they are just plain negligent. I will find joy in the most annoying of characters.

Yet I hate Catra from She-Ra. After the first few episodes, I just never liked her again.

[oathkeeper-of-tarth]

what do you think about joethejohnston's comments about pearl and rose's relationship?

Erm, they make me feel… bad?

He seems to be attempting to be reassuring, but, and no offense to the guy, he had the exact opposite effect on me last night, welp. As in, posting reassurances about Pearl’s agency and how we shouldn’t worry because she wasn’t mind-controlled, she rebelled and made these choices and her and Rose were shown talking as friends and comrades and how there’s more to come in future episodes… and then immediately afterwards explaining how she literally physically could not disobey a direct order given by PD/Rose, who she was “made for”. A bit of getting my hopes up in one ask and then dashing them in the other.

It only applies to Pearl.

BECAUSE our Pearl was made for Pink Diamond, she must follow her orders.

Rose did not have this power or control over anyone else, and its ONLY because Pearl was made for her that Pink/Rose had this power over her.

This, besides being utterly horrifying as a concept, also pretty much sank all my excuses about her maybe being WD’s or some scrap heap rescue pearl or something, not PD’s custom-made personal slave. Or how maybe the “my last order to you” made the possibility of all future orders void - to at least level the playing field a tiny bit after the war, by removing that particular awful thing, and also perhaps removing the idea that Rose could in whatever capacity theoretically return to being PD on a shapeshifty whim, because if she can just turn around and be magically detected as “Pearl’s official owner” even after everything, Pearl’s freedom and wellbeing hinges entirely on Rose’s will and benevolence (even more than it already does?), and that’s never changing, and that is intensely disturbing.

It’s messed up because it’s now been outright said (unless he misspoke and just meant PD, and not “Rose”, as per one of my excuses above) that Rose had the power to literally order Pearl around at any time and she could (apparently, same as with the hand silencing, physically) NOT disobey. And he keeps saying how their relationship grew and changed, which we have yet to see (please bring on those summer eps soon, I have a lot riding on that first meeting ep), but what we HAVE seen is Rose using that power to give Pearl an order when it was convenient for her, or based on how she felt and what she wanted or didn’t want (and just generally really horrible, as not 5 seconds before that she was promising freedom for both of them and a complete and final rejection of their former lives and caste roles - which Pearl was actually really into! - and which, yes, being a pearl and bound to obey persisting direct orders from your owner very much spits in the face of). I find the implications present here pretty horrible.

The whole pearl programming thing he talked about is extremely, extremely, horrifyingly dark. Like, if we never saw later-day them as anything but a fluffy sunshine and roses (hah) relationship it’d still be messed up and need a ton of careful handling and unpacking to work. But we keep seeing the bad/sad bits, Pearl being jealous and grieving and traumatised and risking and devaluing her own life, and frankly being treated pretty shittily, and being told there were good times, too (a frequent complaint re:Pearlrose over the years, actually). And I don’t know about you but I am currently not very comfortable giving PD the benefit of the doubt of a gentle, careful, sensitive, respectful handling of the issue. Especially since we’ve, well, literally seen her use this when it suited her plans.

I see two options here after Pale Rose: either make Pearl/Rose deliberately really dark and awful, have Pearl overcome it and move on and that be a triumph, allow her to feel wronged and be angry, and double down on the gag order as the horrible violation of every principle of freedom and choice and self-determination Rose claims to espouse - of course this saddens me immensely, as the thought of “Rose dying is the best thing to happen to Pearl” always has.

Basically, it’s as @ayu-ohseki said in some asks to me:

I’ve been thinking about PD’s command, and in reflection, I think the intended audience reaction *is* to think it’s fucked up. Earlier that ep, Pearl remarks that she’s good at compartmentalizing, so I suspect on some level she knows it too–she just doesn’t let herself think about it.

And no doubt it’d already occurred to you as well… In terms of Rose herself as well as Rosepearl, I can’t imagine “well, you’re SUPPOSED to think it was fucked up” would be much comfort. :/ But it does make me think that we’ll at least see the matter addressed in upcoming episodes, so that’s something, maybe?

They could also try to have it be a mess but ultimately work at it and redeem it somehow, through a lot of time and concentrated effort (something I’m worried the show won’t be giving them, simply because there is So Much To Do) and a whole lot of apologising and deepening understanding on Rose’s part. While I would prefer the latter, I currently have, besides those tiny suggestions I’ve already mentioned above that would make this slightly more palatable for me, no true idea of how. Not since we’ve already seen a bunch of these two and how they went on after the war and up until the present day, and told that, well, you know Rose, she always did what she wanted, and is also “a horrible person”.

What most certainly doesn’t work for me is bringing that awfulness to the table (I seriously cannot begin to tell you just how much that gag order scene gives me chills and freaks me out), but then kind of… brushing it aside, claiming it was totally okay because it only happened a few times, and it was totally the last time there was an order given because PD said it would be (again, yup, I really have trouble trusting her with this and with anything atm), and not really dealing with the large amount of awful implications present. What I think Joe is trying to say we’re getting is exactly what I’ve wanted for 3 years, Pearl and Rose conspiring together as comrades and rejecting their roles and growing and changing together and whatnot. And on the surface, there was so much in that little scene in ASPR that I’d wanted for so, so long. Actual Rose -> Pearl affection? That hug! Cute blushing! Tender handholding! They sure talked the talk about rejecting their roles forever and being free! Rose getting starry eyed over Pearl and squeeing her name? A dream!

And then… that.

And I would like to believe (I want to believe), and I do believe Pearl really was a rebel and all of that is true, from LOOoBC to Back to the Barn to the Zoo arc, we see how much she hates acting “like a pearl” and how proud she is of belonging to “nobody”, I don’t see how that could all be a lie… And we hear that Rose made her feel like she was everything, we hear her sing about freedom and reinvention, but then what I keep actually seeing Rose do in the show, along with the revelations we keep getting about “how pearls work”, just doesn’t match up with all this. “Rose would never treat Pearl like a pearl!” is and has always been the cornerstone of it all, and, yeah, believe me, I want that to be true more than anything, that she didn’t, but, well… at the very least there’s one time she did, and we saw it, and it wasn’t, oh, super early into their relationship so they’re just figuring things out or anything, and it was a big friggin’ deal focus of a mini-subplot and episode. So yeah, please, convince me, outside that one hologram of that one tiny bit in Scabbard (which is also frankly now pretty dubious as to being a legitimate choice, because, really, what alternative did Pearl actually have? We’ve seen Homeworld has no place for “ownerless pearls”.), that Rose, the person with apparently every single bit of power in this relationship, ever put in the work and care required. That she herself perhaps realised (sadly too late, but she’s an established oblivious ass anyway, so that’d be in character I guess) that giving an order like that was absolutely horrifying and borderline unthinkable and very deeply violating, and that she tried to fix things, and that at least after some point in time Pearl’s freedom was not subject to her in any way. At least try, like, giving her a direct order to never have to obey a direct order ever again! I dunno, something!

And as I’ve mentioned before it kind of… baffles me, why they had to go to this extent with the awfulness? What would really be lost if pearls were really servants, as they keep calling them? As opposed to being made-for-order for owners (yuck) whose direct orders they literally cannot disobey? I feel like they reference a lot of tropes and visuals of a queen and her handmaiden, and also then of course more blatantly a lady and her knight, but then suddenly it goes into a master and a slave and gets horrible - and I’m not sure how intentional it all is and don’t know how it’ll be handled.

Anyway, here is a good meta post about some of this.

The scene is trying to harken back to an old trope where the noblewoman issues one final command before forsaking her right to rule and running off to live happily with their lover of low birth. Such a scene is inherently an act of trust on the part of the noblewoman because the recipient of the order will soon have no reason to obey it. The unspoken understanding is that it is for love of the woman and not her title that such an order will be followed. But that doesn’t work here because Pearl literally and physically had not choice but to obey. There is no trust there. If Pink Diamond had TRUSTED Pearl with her secret, then she would have asked for its safekeeping, not ordered it with an unbreakable command.

Here is another.

@ajoraverse has written some insightful things, too.

To close up, I’m just gonna stick a bit from a fic of mine here which I wrote as a reaction to Back to the Barn, Astronomy in Reverse, and which kind of illustrates how I made this work for me back then after that particular chilling reveal, and which feels quite relevant now (even if it’s jossed to hell)

“Pearl?”

“Yes, Steven?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I…” She wanted to say you weren’t ready and you’re too young and it’s all in the past, but instead she bit her tongue and opted for forcing out the truth. It was the least she could do, really, and he deserved it, and there was hardly any harm left to be done now. “I didn’t want you to think… differently of me.”

Maybe it had been selfish of her - she knew plenty of things over the years had been. But Steven started fidgeting again in that way that let her know he had more questions - and ones he was sure she wouldn’t like him asking. But she’d promised herself and promised them both she’d do her best, and that was what she fully intended.

“What Peridot said - did… did mom… own you?”

Pearl couldn’t help but cringe at the word, dug up again. It made her think of how long it had taken her to shake off some of its more insidious claws, and the effort it had taken to fully accept that if things happened to be a certain way on Homeworld it didn’t mean they had to be that way. It felt surprising - in a good way, perhaps - to see just how ingrained that belief had become in her, and how ridiculous so much of what Peridot was spouting at them had immediately been. She was proving to be a good test, if nothing else, and a stretching of figurative muscles that had lain mostly dormant for millennia, as isolated as they’d all been.  

But Steven had asked a question.

“For a while, formally, yes. But she refused to act like it. Always bucking convention, full of radical ideas… your mother was truly something else, Steven.”

Basically my point is Rose being adamant about never treating pearl as a pearl, the “ownership” only as a (legal-ish) formality in order to protect Pearl within the system that Rose had a lot of power in and in which she had none, and then Rose devoting herself to tearing that same system down. That’s what made it work for me, and that’s what’s now absent here and hence creeping me out. 

So yeah, I’m still really sad, and endlessly angry on Pearl’s account, and freaked out at the constantly deepening grimdark implications whenever we learn anything about Pearl(s). And of course I want my Merely Complicated Pearlrose back, but I don’t think that’s happening. Though another thing to keep in mind with regards to Joe is I have very strongly disagreed with some of his takes on things in the past, so… bring on “this Summer TM”, once again, I guess, and I’ll see what it ends up being in the actual episodes. I think I’ll do one last big post I have drafted which was an attempt to reply to more of the asks I got, and then mostly be done.