Ren's Endless List of Blorbos ⬥ #2

Character: Rose Quartz Series: Steven Universe (Cartoon Network) Actor: Susan Egan

She barely has any screentime but the entire plot revolves around her messy past. She is the poster child for the sins of the mother being held against the very exhausted son. She was doomed to fandom discourse hell because we saw all her character development in reverse. Truly she is iconic.

its a little rough but thought it would be fun to draw the gems in the late 60s with some random rose's love interest

At your mercy

no song lyrics to go with the theme but i was listening to this on loop while drawing these

can we talk about how garnet most likely got the story of the rebel hero rose quartz and the cruel pink diamond that created her from rose herself and how pink is described as a coward, cruel, wicked. and how rose told greg it's good he doesn't know anything about her. and how rose felt like she owed greg a list of everything shed ever done wrong. and how rose didn't tell pearl anything about what she did because she couldn't bear to lose that love. and how rose didn't think how her actions would effect pearl and in trying to destroy the part of herself that she felt did nothing but hurt and ruin everything and deserved to die, she hurt one of the people she loved the most. can we talk about the fact rose is a self fulfilling prophecy and destroyed herself twice. once asking pearl to kill pink diamond. and then by having steven. and how both times, it was out of love for change and hatred for herself. and wanting there to be someone better in her wake. and out of fear of what she'd done. and how at the end of the day her story is a tragedy because she believed everyone could change and become a better person. the only exception she had ever made on that was for herself. because she knew she used to be a horrible person and the one thing that scared her more than anything was the fact she didn't know how to fix it. so she didn't. she ended it all, and she prayed that the child in her wake would be a better person. because she, fundamentally, thinks she's irredeemable. and the only good thing she could do now was give her life to someone that deserved it.

can we talk about the fact that rose fucking quartz would rather die than try to confront the people she hurt because she thinks the only thing that'd do would hurt them more. and she can never learn to see the good she did as well. because all she thinks she does is hurt.

can we talk about the fact that rose isn't a twist villain, she's a fucking twist tragedy. oh my god. this fucking SHOW.

A pearl and rose doodle :))

Some recent SU-themed Patreon requests

Draw your characters like this

idkkkk random su redesign explorations??... or something...

"Rose Quartz was a bad mother" is a really baffling interpretation of Steven Universe, because Rose never got to be a mother in the first place.

Even if you take the stance that Rose was a bad person (which I vehemently disagree with, but you do you I guess), it's still not possible for her to have been a "bad mom" or even a "good mom." We literally have no idea what kind of mother she would have been to Steven, because she died.

She left some messy stuff behind, sure, but who the hell doesn't leave messy stuff behind when they die? A traumatized victim of generational trauma and abuse dying in childbirth doesn't equal "bad mother." Like, what?

And on top of that, if I dropped dead tomorrow and my shitty abusive family members swarmed around my kid, that's...not my fault? I've done everything I can in life to keep my kid away from the shitty abusive parts of our family. I cut them out as thoroughly as I possibly can. I can't control anything else. If they show up after I die to harass my kiddo, that's not my doing. Because I would in fact be dead.

I think way too many people try to make Rose responsible for literally every bad action that other people took, which is asinine both because it takes agency and impact away from every other character, but also because, like. She's not real. She is fictional. You don't have to hold her accountable for crimes, and that was never the point of the story in the first place. She served a narrative purpose, which was to tell a story about generational trauma. I'm less interested in "bad person vs good person" analysis and much more interested in "was this an effective way to tell a story about a very messy victim of cyclical abuse, and how hard it is to break the cycle without there being repercussions. Sometimes the cycle doesn't break cleanly."

I think it was, personally, especially considering the huge amounts of censorship heaped upon the show. I'd love to take a peek into the universe where they got to fully flesh out the story they originally intended, instead of getting cut off at the knees by homophobic studio heads.

This thing is fucking huge. I was using black double sided tape to hold it together so I could what it looks like before starting the actual work

mARTch day 13 : warm colors

Pearl’s dream

wlw adoption

everybody falls in love sometime something in your kiss just told me

my sometime is now