See, there’s a difference between “sympathetic” and “good”. That’s what some people don’t get about the Diamonds: they are simultaneously real, three-dimensional characters with thoughts, feelings, desires, flaws and virtues, and awful, evil tyrants. It’s important to understand that; thinking that people who do bad things are inhuman or “other” not only contributes to the purity culture that metastasized in Tumblr’s heart over the last decade or so but drives the fallacy where people think that because they’re not-evil/unproblematic/good-christians/etc they must be doing the right thing. I’ve mentioned before the video floating around of Adolf Hitler flirting with his wife. It’s terrifying, more so than any of his speeches or commands, because it’s a reminder that he was human, just like us.
We must be on guard against othering evil people, because it leads to declaring the other evil. Sound like anything that’s going on right now?
Yellow and Blue Diamond, because they’re real, three-dimensional characters, aren’t spending every waking moment crushing gems, torturing puppies, and ordering the eradication of inhabited planets. Yellow and Blue really did grieve Pink Diamond, really have been coming from the consistent position of “YOU ASSHOLES KILLED THIS PERSON I GENUINELY LOVED”, and that makes them sympathetic. What it does not make them is good people. They’re still tyrants, still oppressive dictators who murder dissidents and discourage individuality.
It never made much sense as anything but a cartoonishly evil revenge tactic to drive every Gem on the surface of the Earth insane instead of destroying them like the Diamonds were apparently trying to do, so after pondering it I’m okay with them “just” have been trying to dust everyone, but I guess I didn’t think too hard about why they did that thing in particular. It’ll be interesting to see how this goes.
