I was going through videos of the song G-G-Ghost from Steven Universe and I just realized that the quick drum beat at the beginning of it makes me uncomfortable bc it sounds like the beginning of the Rickroll song, omg.
So after the big reveal, there was a lot of uproar, with people getting furious over what Pink Diamond did. Heck, I was one of them.
But after thinking it over, I realized that maybe some of it is being a bit overstated. There’s been a lot of talk about how Rose was evil or how she created a war because she was bored or how she only created Steven to run away from responsibility.
Y’all. The vast majority of evidence does not support this.
So anyway, here are some important reminders:
The Gem War was already going on for 1,000 years before Pink Diamond decided to fake her shattering. She did this because she thought it would end the war, and allow the Crystal Gems to live in peace. Yes, it backfired, and yes, she should have considered that the other Diamonds would seek revenge, but at the end of the day, she legitimately believed that the Diamonds wouldn’t care enough to take action if they thought she was gone.
She still started the war to protect the humans who lived there. Like, seriously, none of that changed. EARTH WOULD BE DESTROYED IF IT WEREN’T FOR HER. I mean, what did she have to gain by picking a fight with herself? All she wanted was a colony of her own. When she got it, she discovered the organic life on Earth and realized she didn’t want to go along with it anymore.
“Curiosity turned to appreciation. Appreciation turned to fondness. And fondness turned to love.”
Yes, Pink didtry talking to the other Diamonds before starting a war. Remember what Steven heard in his dream. Pink Diamond did try and talk to the other Diamonds, bringing up the organic life, but they saw it as a sign of her incompetence, not as a reason to let the planet be free. After that, she tried arguing that the cities were too hard to dismantle (which obviously was a lie), but when that didn’t fly, she created the Crystal Gems and used that as an excuse.
After the war, she spent 6,000 years trying to find a way to heal the corrupted Gems. Why do you think the Crystal Gems have been bubbling all the monsters they fight? It’s been said that Rose always hoped to find a way to heal them. It’s not like they died and she just went “Eh, what can ya do?” She felt guilty about what had happened, and she spent ages trying to atone.
Honestly, I still stand by the theory that she created Steven at least in part because she hoped that a human’s capacity to grow might mean that he would eventually become powerful enough to heal them. I mean, he did go further in healing Centipeedle than Rose ever did, and he still has a lot of growth to come. It makes sense that Rose saw that she had reached a plateau and hoped that Steven could do better.
It’s not her fault that there was a power imbalance between her and Pearl. Look, this was fucked up, and it kills me, too. But Pearl’s devotion to Rose wasn’t something Rose could have helped more than she already did. Remember, she gave Pearl the choice to stay loyal to Homeworld. She encouraged Pearl to come into her own. She declared Pearl a free Pearl. But there’s only so much she could do. Yes, Pearl’s devotion to Rose/PD and her feelings of being lost after Rose was gone was tragic, and it breaks my heart. But what more could Rose do?
“Why won’t you just let me do this for you, Rose?”
“Did Rose make you feel like you were nothing?” “Rose made me feel like I was…everything.”
She left Bismuth for Steven to find. It’s clear that the reason she bubbled Bismuth (and kept it a secret) was because Bismuth would have known the truth about the shattering and wouldn’t have stood for it. But when she created Steven, she left Bismuth in the same place as her video for him. She probably figured this was her chance to let Bismuth finally be free.
Look, obviously Pink Diamond made some pretty huge miscalculations that caused a lot of pain and death. That doesn’t make her a bad person. She had to constantly face a number of hard choices where there was no easy answer, and each time, she went with what she thought was best.
Should she have ordered Pearl to keep quiet? No. Yet, at the time it seemed like the best choice.
Should she have told the other Crystal Gems the truth after the Corruption Song? Maybe. Yet, at the time it seemed like a better choice to keep it hidden.
(Should she have challenged the other Diamonds head-on without a disguise? Hell no, summoning their full wrath would have been suicide, and the Earth would get colonized anyway.)
I get it: it’s easy to demonize someone who comes from a position of power when things go wrong on a major scale. But the fact is that it’s not that simple. People have limits, people have flaws, people make mistakes. Pink is a Diamond. Her choices were always going to have far-reaching consequences, and she tried her best given what she had. We’re in a morally grey zone with both positive and negative outcomes.
I’ve talked a lot about Imposter’s Syndrome and the all-encompassing, paralytic thrall it’s cast over me for basically my entire life. I second guess my shit constantly. I’m slow to start new projects, because my brain assumes I’ll be incapable of making them any good.
This was especially true from college onward. I majored in broadcast journalism, a field I found myself wholly unsuited for. I was uncomfortable talking to people, especially strangers — which, you know, kind of comes with the territory.
At Joystiq, I wrote news posts and reviews, and the whole time I was there, I never thought I was very good at it. I believed I was in a field that I was terrible at, and feared it was only a matter of time before I was discovered.
That’s Imposter’s Syndrome 101. And even as I started doing stuff I was a bit more comfortable with — namely, the Joystiq podcast and MBMBaM, I was never able to be fully confident in the work I was doing. It kept me up at night, wondering when the other shoe was going to drop.
When we started talking about moving over to start Polygon, that fear became the loudest voice in the room. I knew that with starting a new project came an enormous amount of scrutiny, and that I wouldn’t be able to sail under the radar much longer.
I was Deputy News Editor when Polygon launched, meaning now, I was responsible for helping to oversee and help train other reporters in my field. As much as I loved this work, I couldn’t shake the guilt that I was in no position to teach folks these ropes in ANY capacity.
Two years later, my Imposter’s Syndrome and its associated anxiety reached a breaking point. I considered leaving games altogether, then, and focusing on the podcasts — a realm where my lack of confidence still existed, but was much quieter than it was in this, my full-time job.
Around that time, Polygon started to rethink its video efforts. The strategy had been a focus on high-touch video packages and longform storytelling. As superb as that stuff was, it was a somewhat unsustainable model that left a lot of gaps in what our channel could offer.
We needed someone to spearhead video for the site, and, being unhappy and uncertain about my journalistic chops, I saw it as a vine I could swing onto — despite the fact that I had zero idea how to actually make a video. Somewhat hesitantly, I agreed to take on the task.
The first month in this position was fucking terrifying. Not only did I have to self-educate myself about a lot of technical skills, I also wrestled with the responsibility of rebuilding our website’s video strategy from the ground up.
But I stuck with it, trying to improve the quality and quantity of the Overview-style stuff we were making in those days. A year in, and I felt like our video output was passable, if still not entirely in my wheelhouse.
Then, about sixteen months after taking the new position, and after a weeklong strategy meeting w/ our ragtag video team: We did the first Monster Factory.
The reception to that first Monster Factory was a total sea change, both for the tone of the videos we started to make, and for how I thought about the work I could do in this industry.
There was a realization that my middling feelings about my work was actually a direct result of how I tried to distance myself from the things I was making.
That “flying under the radar” approach was precisely the cause of why I felt like my work was merely adequate — it was only through really leaning in that I started making things I was proud of.
Which brings me to what I want to say about Polygon. There has never been a moment while I’ve worked here that I did not feel encouraged to chase that instinct.
(That isn’t to say that ideas don’t get shot down — they totally do! But only after long, supportive discussions about how to make our ideas and passions work.)
I said when we announced we were leaving that I adore our team, but that goes beyond the individual level — though I do admire the individuals, as well. I adore the TEAM, and this atmosphere of experimentation and boundless personal expression that it fosters. And all of this culminates, in my mind, with one particular video series.
It began as a very silly joke I made during a weekly meeting, which the team encouraged me to chase after.
I shot the first episode that same day, and by the end of the week, the video was live. It was, and continues to be, the strangest thing I’ve ever done.
This series, and the other stuff I’ve done in the past few years at Polygon — it leaves no room for the Imposter’s Syndrome that has cast a shadow over my entire creative life. Though it seems an unlikely candidate for this truth, it was one of the most personally, creatively empowering things I’ve ever worked on.
so we got Pink Diamond, right? Her initials? PD. What do those letters sound like? Peedee. Remember when Peedee was first introduced? It was a whole episode about how, despite originally being excited to join his family business, he ended up hating the job that was assigned to him by his father who expected him to do it just because he was a Fryman and failed to notice that his son was unhappy and wanted something better.
and uh, say…. doesn’t what Peedee went through…. sound a little familiar…. to what PD went through
60 year old historian Martin Bühler (who identified himself to the press, I do not identify activists without consent) appears to ‘photobomb’ a lot of media images of the G20 in Hamburg. In reality he is a long time observer documenting police brutality. In Hamburg he chose to cultivate the most non-activist ‘white bystander in a suit with a bike’ look he could manage and casually walked in front of police. As police slowed down or interrupted attacks and waited for the ‘bystander’ to get out of the way (being caught on camera trashing what look like bystanders is bad press after all), activists had time to regroup or retreat.
oh my god, what a fucking badass
Clever, useful, AND unprosecutable
And a utterly, wonderfully devious use of his privilege.
and a utterly
wonderfully devious use
of his privilege
^Haiku^bot^9. I detect haikus with 5-7-5 format. Sometimes I make mistakes.
Ranty-Ramblestein's Tumblr Import 