A SINGLE PALE ROSE GRGRHDHDBDHSH,, I don’t have a ton to say (especially since it’s been years since I’ve watched most of su) but PLEASE rant about a single pale rose I beg

Man A Single Pale Rose. That episode was such a turning point it was huge when it came out. For ages one of the biggest debates in the fandom was between the people who thought Rose was Pink Diamond, and the people who thought that the people who thought Rose was PD were idiots. I was part of the latter group i thought there was no way that could possibly be true its just one of those crazy theories that doesn’t make any sense. And then Single Pale Rose happened and shook Everything

Single Pale Rose Single Handedly causes the entire rest of the season, if Steven hadn’t decided then and there to push on it if Pearl hadn’t managed to find a way to actually tell him. If it hadnt have happened the diamonds would have shown up and the crystal gems would have lost, the only reason they don’t is that Steven manages to tell them hes PD, if it had of been a little later the diamonds would have arrived in the middle of That emotional debacle

One part of the episode i really like is how it builds up, it gives you hints and implications as the episode goes on so by the time the actual reveal happens and you see Rose shapeshift into PD you pretty much already know where the scene is going. I just think its a clever way to do it and also the whole pearl-ception thing with pearl inside pearl inside pearl inside pearl inside pearl’s pearl, its played for a joke but has some interesting implications about how gems memories work and weather it applies to all gems or if Pearl is specific in that way

The way Rose is portrayed throughout the series is really interesting to me, people have said it before but her arc really is shown in reverse. The first mentions the audience gets of her is characters praising her and making her look like the most perfect person in the world, placing her high up on this pedestal that everyone put her on and making Steven think he has to try to live up to what everyone else says about Rose, then as season 1 and 2 go on theres little bits and pieces, we find out maybe she wasn’t completely perfect and had some flaws but she was still really really good. And then come season 3 the real cracks start to show, she poofed and bubbled Bismuth and hid it from everyone for some unclear reason, i feel like theres smthn else but im blanking, and then in the last three eps of the season, Beta, Back To The Moon, and Bubbled, its all shattered (he) when we find out Rose Killed somebody, also retroactively making the Bismuth thing worse. And then barely a season and a half later it’s revealed that Rose and the person she killed, are the same person. And that messes with everything. Now she looks like this awful person who lied to everyone who ever cared about her and caused the deaths of thousands of people by staging a stupid war where she was the head of both sides. And then with the movie and future we learn about Pink Pearl and Spinel and how theyve been treated.

And thats the order her arc is presented in because thats the order Steven learns about it in. And so Rose goes from a saint Steven could never dream of living up to, to someone Steven never wants to be anything like. But if you reorganise everything into chronological order, while shes still not a great person and still did some awful awful things, you can see her intentions and that she really wasnt a malicious party in all this. She starts off a kid, and being treated like one by the people she craves to be seen as a equal by. Shes mistreated by the people around her and so tries to get their attention the only way she knows how, by throwing tantrums. Eventually she manages to get her own colony and almost instantly she sees whats wrong with what they’re doing, shes likely never had the chance to see the process in action so she never got it until then. She tries and tries to go back on what shes said but the other diamonds wont let her, so she makes a drastic choice that then has consequences she hadn’t considered. And an all out war breaks out, but shes too deep by now, she can just come out and say what shes done nobody will ever take her seriously ever again, so she has to end it on her own. And she does the war ends. She didnt know what the diamonds would do after she didnt know about the cluster or the gem experiments or the corruption song, if she’d known maybe she would have made a different choice, maybe she wouldnt have who knows. And then she spends the rest of her days loving and protecting the world she fought so hard for, living with the knowledge of the things shes done, and she tries to be better.