Tastes like Lightning

For you and your internet friends! 💙

see, this is what you get wrong anon. 

my channel is pure precisely because it doesn’t have jackshit on it. ergo, it can’t be bad. it’s a metaphor about how youtube sucks and cannot be redeemed - just like how 99% of these people felt about the diamonds, while i was on tumblr being correct about the show redeeming everyone. 

most SU youtubers: didn’t understand why the narrative was always heading towards rose diamond. treat each episode with immediate hot takes, makes “the real villain” videos unironically. more interested in animation than writing. steal video ideas from each other, oft seem more influenced by fellow influencers and other cartoons than the show itself. wants SU to be an AtlA clone.

While some offer interesting theories it seems like most of them completely miss what the show stands for and judge the characters as if they are placed in another, simpler cartoon.

The show’s message, btw, isnt “all people are good on the inside uwu” like many seem to think?? No, SU offers a much more complex take on this. Su never tells you whos bad and whos good, it only shows you characters doing things that could be considered “good” or “bad” but NEVER deems any of these characters as one of those things. It gives them room to change and grow, guides them to perform more “good” actions. Non of the characters on Su is beyond doing something bad, even Steven. He had made mistakes in the past that hurt people that he loved. The entire conflict of the show was Steven trying to deem his mother as either a “bad” or “good” person before he let it go, realizing she did both good and bad things and that it doesnt make her a bad person.

Back to the Diamonds, most videos Ive seen on their “characters” that bothered telling them apart always stuck to “blue sad, yellow mad, white bad” mentality which is so… superficial. They have so much to offer, and are such fascinating antagonists (you can find actual good analysis of them on tumblr, like on op’s blog), theres no need to dumb them down to these caricatures… or maybe thats the only thing the YouTube crowd wants them to be.

Think about it. "Villains" often think they're doing the world good, but others see it as bad. Like let's say someone is committing genocide and their reason is to save the earth from dying because they value the planet far more than humans. Maybe people mistreated them, which is most often the case.

Another case is going mad with power. Mustache Girl (from the game "A Hat in Time") did. She lost her planet to a bunch of rude thugs that bullied and teased her. So she vowed to take them down in any way possible. When she learns of the time pieces turning back time, she asks Hat Kid to help her go back in time and help her fight evil. Hat Kid said no cos she just wanted to go home. Neither character is bad, they both just have different driving motives. Mustache Girl got mad cos she said no, so she took that as Hat Kid not liking her as her friend. They became enemies. In the end, well. I'll let you guys see it for yourselves. Point being, Mustache Girl went "evil" because she became mad with power and lost sight of her original goal. SO SORRY for sidetracking. Back to SU lol.

So the Diamonds saw using other planets to grow gems as a good way to make more. The Diamonds viewed this as a very good thing, as they are conquerors. Where as Pink Diamond and Rose Quartz saw that as wrong after seeing what Earth was like. So Rose had to do some horrible things to try and correct the system. She seemed bad to the Diamonds and their courts while the rebels saw her as good. The Crystal Gems saw destroying planets to make more gems as wrong and fought against the remaining three Diamonds.

Blue, Yellow, and even White all suffered because of Pink's death. And this really affected the Diamonds. It seems evident that Yellow, Blue, and White were all like mother figures to Pink and Pink was their child. I'm sure they felt the equivalent that a human mother feels when she loses her child. They each also had their own way of coping with this sinking fact that their "child" is now dead.

Blue cried because she's very emotional and shows this by expressing more than just sadness. She also seems to feel angry as well. She cried so much that she perfected the art of crying. She literally made crying into an art in their universe. Yellow shut it out, because she has to be that strong leader for her court. And when you bottle up your feelings and pretend like they don't exist can really mess with you. She became really irritated and angry due to this. She was hurt by Pink's death just as much as Blue was. This was shown later on in this episode as she almost poofs Blue. Yellow and Blue obviously have a very close relationship. Wether they are actually sisters or not hasn't been revealed yet, but you're honestly allowed to view them as either or. Yellow straight up ugly cried when she realised what she almost did. But you know, the type of crying from when everything just comes pouring out like a volcano? Yeah, you do that when you're really hurt and never really cry. I should know.

Then White did the same thing Yellow did, but to the extreme. White viewed emotion as a flaw, a weakness. And she can't be weak, she needs to maintain that perfect image. So she made herself devoid of it, including her Pearl. She even goes as far as removing Blue's and Yellow's colours from them, just like her pearl. They got out of line and she snapped. So I think of that as her way of an eternal grounding.

This episode alone revealed SO MUCH of the Diamond's motives and emotions. It showed how deeply hurt they all were. And White even went off colour for a while cos Steven got through to her. She became off colour because she was feeling things. She became emotionally vulnerable, which temporarily made her "imperfect" and "off colour". To feel is to be vulnerable, and to have weakness is to be imperfect. Perfection does not exist and that too is what this show also wants to tell people. That even the perso you view as perfect, is far from it and that's perfectly okay.

short answer: planning definitely makes my life easier with comics! i do messy thumbs on paper where i get issues sorted->digital sketches->finals. taking advantage of the comic format helps me convey mood clearly - stuff like page turns, adding/breaking/removing panel borders, panel size, bubbles…all are unique to this medium! i try to be aware of how i can use those as tools to control the way a reader will move through the comic, and how things are paced. if you utilize them well, it’ll read correctly!

an excessively longer answer after the cut ! v