Was Rose A Good Person? | Steven Universe

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i think Rose was a good gem. but she didn't understand humans enough to be a good person. and you cant really fault her for that. she was raised in a different kind of way and was a good enough person to realize that that way wasn't good for others.

I am personally of the belief that rose BECAME a good character. She gave up everything to defend the earth, for thousands of years, before ultimately giving even her life so that Steven could exist. Him feeling like he was meant to be her, would be the last thing she would want, she wanted more than anything for him to be his own person.

Huh... I didn't realize until now that Spinel's "Drift Away" scene is thematically identical to Jessie's "When She Loved Me" from Toy Story 2. Spinel and Jessie are both living beings perceived as toys that their owners grew out of. No malicious intent, just kids maturing and leaving their childhood interests behind.

It makes me baffled how many people love the diamonds but hate Rose

Personally, the take that Rose had Steven so that he could deal with all her problems fundamentally misunderstands the timeline of the show. Rose and the remaining Crystal Gems were on earth for thousands of years after the war, after the Diamonds had sent out the corruption light. From there on out, the Crystal Gems worked to bubble all of the corrupted gems so that they wouldn’t have to live in that state and they would be at peace. They were doing this for THOUSANDS OF YEARS AFTER THE WAR. Then Rose meets Greg, their relationship develops, and she has always been in love with the natural life on this Earth that she wants to create something that will join it. Nobody knew how things would turn out because Steven is the first half-gem half-human, and all of them thought it would be something different. Amethyst thought it was shape shifting, Garnet thought it was fusion, Pearl thought Rose’s gem was trapped inside of Steven’s body. They didn’t understand humans until they had Steven and began raising him, but the point is, until the Red Eye shows up in episode two, there hasn’t been any Homeworld Activity on earth for THOUSANDS OF YEARS. She didn’t leave Steven to deal with her problems because she did not know that they would be coming back to the planet she fought so hard to free from their grasps.

She's morally grey and I refuse to label her as good or bad, but I think it's valid for those she's hurt to hate her.

I think Pink Diamond was basically a child/teen/yound adult and Rose Quartz was the person who outgrew her initially terrible traits and behaviors. She still wasnt perfect in the end and left behind a mess instead of fixing it herself, but she also could not have known what to do. In the end she was a decent person who had outgrown MOST of her flaws, but that doesnt make the new things learned about her past hurt people any less.

I really can't blame Rose for deciding to have Steven. By that point Homeworld had stopped being a problem for THOUSANDS of years, no one could have expected them to return during Steven's lifetime, at the most inconvenient time possible.

I don't understand why people expected Pink Diamond to immediately know how to be a good person after literally thousands of years of terrible lessons from the Diamonds and no other role models.

I've always said Rose WASN'T a good person... Because she wasn't a person at all to begin with. She BECAME a good "person" after starting to learn about humans and empathy. The tricky thing about it is that we've seen Rose's growth IN REVERSE. When we first start hearing about her, we hear about how wonderful and nice she was IN HER LASTS DAYS. But as we uncover more and more of her story, we see less and less humanity in her. And since we see that growth in reverse, we're left with the wrong impression that she was in fact a "bad person" after all. I agree that she's a complicated character, but only in the way her story was told. Other than that, she was as bad as Peridot (which we've seen being "bad" and turn into "good" in chronological order)

Rose was an abuse victim that did the best she could. Not a bad person. Just flawed and misunderstood.

I'd also like to point out that Pink damaging Pink Pearl was what led to her mellowing out, when she was given Spinel to replace Pink Pearl as a playmate, she left her because she felt as though she'd grown past being someone's playmate.

The thing with Pink is that she was basically a child just with immense power until she grew up. It’s a bit like the Collector from The Owl House, and everybody loves them.

The fact that she saw humans as equals by giving herself up to have one showed much love she had for humans as a whole. She abandoned her past and everything she learned to help stop the colonization of a planet. No leader in war can be completely good — people’s lives are at risk and everything is a gamble. With everything Rose was given, I say ofc some things could’ve been handled differently but with how she was raised and how change doesn’t come naturally to gem, she did what she could.

I always thought she was a flawed person. In a world where everyone inspired to be perfect, she some how found beauty in flaws. At the very end, regardless of all of her friends and family, she decided to make a selfish and selfless decision to end her own existence and create a new one. She was apart of a ruling class and gave it all up for a planet that wasn't her own to create something she would never know. I also like to consider... we all know that Rose Quart and her 3 crystal gems were quite easily able to dominate earth. But instead of being conquerors of the humans, they allowed the humans to grow with very little interference from them. I think that speaks more than her interpersonal relationships with other gems

Another thing to add onto the Spinel story line is that Spinel was always happy, always trying to play and I think Pink was at a time in her life where she wasn't happy, she didn't want to play games. Spinel was making her feel like a child just like how the other diamonds treated her as a child, and if she wanted to move on she felt she had to leave Spinel.

The reverse arc was actually super cool, its just sad that people didnt see it like that. Rose just feels like a real person compared to other gems

I wish the bismuth thing was better contextualized as causing in fighting in the rebellion as opposed to “I’m gonna shatter you with it” and her diamond sisters. More than those though, I wish/headcanon that the primary reason she bubbled bismuth is that Bismuth knew that the sword couldn’t of shattered pink

My thoughts on some of these points: 1) no notes, you covered this point as much as I would 2) Children throw tantrums because they feel impotent and don't have a grasp of their feelings and how to manage them. It's amoral, not good or bad, because it's not a decision. It's a state of overwhelm. Pink was in arrested development because she was never given a chance to make decisions like an adult. She was squarely pegged into a child role no matter how old she was. And so she felt impotent, and had no basis for emotional management as she only grew more frustrated with her status. Her harming her Pearl was a catalyst for her to change, though, because it was a permanent consequence of her lack of control. How she responded to that event can be a basis for judging her, but the event itself is not. 3) I don't think Pink/Rose had a sense of commitment in relationships before Greg. She had flings, for fun. That's what every human had been to her before Greg, and that's how being with the gems around her was, too. They just lived longer than the humans did, and had no reason to go separate ways. I don't fault Pearl for feeling possessive over Rose given all they'd been through together, but that doesn't make her right. And I don't think there was any way, really, for Rose to let Pearl go easy. Pearl knew what was going on. She was beginning to grieve when she recognized that Greg was different for Rose than all the humans before. But she fought it, because she needed her status with Rose to feel special. Rose definitionally could not relieve her of that, because any affirmation from Rose would be... an affirmation from Rose. 4) again, no notes, she had precarious, high stakes decisions to make and frequently lying was just the safer option - Rose chose safety over maybe being more ethical, but what's the morality of that really? 5) Pink/Rose did change in her life, but I don't think after everything she really had any faith in gems changing. Her circumstances changed enough that maybe she was herself as always being the same and just acting different in response to different circumstances. She was ecstatic for how humans are hard-coded for change, though. Something worth noting here is that when gems fuse, they share something of themselves - but not one of the gems around her realized that Rose was Pink. She was hiding that hard. I don't think her point was to saddle Steven with her mess, but I do think that she believed she wasn't good enough, couldn't change enough, to make everything right. But maybe her kid could be better, because her kid would be human. Pink Rose was better than a "good person" or "bad person". She was an interesting, complex person. But a lot of people want to be able to label other people and fictional characters as "good" or "bad", because it's more comfortable than "it's complicated", and that's why she polarizes the fan base. If the writers hadn't done a good job of crafting a gray character, the fan base would be a lot less divided.