You know how
everyone thought Rose Quartz was Pink Diamond for a while, before we saw how fukkin huge Diamonds are? Most of that was because of this image:
With what we know now, we correctly guessed the other gem pictured was a Diamond, and that Rose was holding a Diamond’s gem. But they’re like…the same height.
Sure, it could be a symbolic thing–equal in importance, or equals in that moment. But look again, at the figures all around Rose Quartz. What do they symbolize?
Perhaps Rose Quartz shattered Pink Diamond…while in a fusion with many other Rose Quartzes.
These guys.
Yellow Diamond does say that Pink Diamond was shattered by “A Rose Quartz,” but if you want to get really technical, a Rose Quartz fusion would still be a Rose Quartz. And then we have this:
A lot of us assumed that the other Rose Quartzes were only guilty by association–that they’d been assumed to be a bad batch, or something. But what if they were literally all part of it? Maybe they’re awaiting their final punishment because the Diamonds wanted to punish all of them together.
I know that we’re seeing the events of Buddy’s Book filtered through Steven’s imagination, but it still struck me that Rose Quartz was in her usual dress even though the other gems were wearing their old-timey clothing from the painting of Garnet punching a shark that shows up in So Many Birthdays (a reference to the 1778 painting “Watson and the Shark”).
I looked back at the SU version of that painting to see what Rose was wearing, and it looks like Rose put on a shirt and a scarf over her dress, the same way she wore the Mr Universe shirt after Greg gave it to her (you can see the corner of the dress behind Amethyst’s hair). Then I looked at some older images of Rose: Holo-Rose at the end of Rose’s Scabbard, and when she talks to cotton-candy Garnet in The Answer. In both cases, she was wearing the same dress that she always has on. The same dress she was wearing when she met Greg. The same dress she had while pregnant with Steven. All the other gems change their appearance over time, but never Rose.
She has never, in her entire existence, reformed. No one has ever defeated Rose Quartz on the battlefield.
