DAILY FUCKING REMINDER THAT JASPER IS STILL GONE AND PROBABLY WAS TURNED BACK INTO A VILLAIN. THANKS FOR NOTHING BECKY.
THANKS FOR CRUSHING MY HOPES
See my extensive thoughts on Jasper here since you haven’t read them.
There’s a lot of words there but every time I see people defend Jasper I have to say something. She belongs in that villain montage. I’d be very upset if she wasn’t in it. She’s an abuser, a war criminal, and an enemy soldier. She even abandons her orders and allegiance to the Diamond Authority to hunt down Steven with every part of her being. She subjugates and even fuses with a corrupted gem (essentially animals but are in fact normal gems like her that are suffering and infected) attempting to overpower Steven. She’s constantly being defeated by the concept of love; Garnet after Sapphire and Ruby fused for the first time on-screen, Steven and Amethyst’s familial connection of support and affirmation, and Lapis refusing to refuse with Jasper because it wasn’t a fusion of mutual support and affection. Jasper refuses to let herself love or be loved, evidenced by her rejection of Steven’s offer of aid just before she corrupted. Our first hint of her future likable nature is her being emotionally tamped down by Amethyst and the Diamonds when she returned post-corruption.
Bismuth has a similar situation where “everything’s changed” after she hears that Steven is Pink Diamond. I assume Jasper had a similar reaction and was like, “Oh shit. Well, this is awkward.” But, Jasper is far more vitriolic and less willing to listen than Bismuth. She shuts out everyone who doesn’t do as she says. She can’t even listen to her superiors. I can’t imagine she took the whole “we’re not fighting anymore” thing very well.
But she’s going to be redeemed. There’s not question about this. It’s happening. In fact, it probably already has. Many relationships and characters have developed off-screen and she could easily have been relegated to that. If we get a post-movie s6, there will certainly be at least an episode about about Jasper’s internal conflict. Rebecca Sugar isn’t sitting in her office twiddling her mustache going, “Myes, those Jasper fans will get nothing and LIKE IT! MUWHAHAHAHAHAHA!” *lighting crackles in the background* She cares for her characters, and this show is all about redemption, forgiveness, and willingness to change. Arguably, Jasper is the least willing to change. But it has to happen or the whole theme of the show falls apart.
But she is an abuser and redeeming abusers can be problematic. Evil space nazis is one thing because it feels so removed and distant. We don’t actually see the Diamonds do anything terrible. We hear about it, hear about what they could do, what they could have done, but it’s all speculation and inferences. Jasper was presented as a criminal, and enemy soldier, and an abuser and all of that is shown to us in black and white. She attempts to murder/shatter each of the Crystal Gems and gets damn close a number of times. Unlike Lapis and Peridot, she isn’t following orders or just trying to get away, this is personal. It stopped being business after the Crystal Gems escaped the hand ship. And her parallels to abusive partners is too real and too close to home for many viewers, so her redemption needs to be handled carefully. She didn’t need to be such a complex character, but the writers chose to make her that way so she is.
It’s not a bad things to be a fan of Jasper. Just don’t ignore that fact that she’s a Terrible Person™.
1) Wow, that’s a lot of crap you expect people to read because I guess you just have that big of an opinion about the things you say. But okay, I’ll bite. Here’s a whole spiel.
You almost get to a point but your view is ultimately tied into the text - and SU has no writers to bring consistency to the narrative, and no narrative can be truly examined without external factors being judged.
For one: RS in the SU podcasts confirms Lapis had the power in Malachite, tortured Jasper, and that Lapis feels bad in LaS because she is being confronted with how badly she hurts people when they make themselves vulnerable to her. Lapis isn’t recovering from Jasper trauma - she’s recovering from the realisation that she can and will and enjoys hurting people for the sake of getting revenge on, well, anyone. To quote Sugar ‘It didn’t even matter that it was Jasper’. If Amethyst, Peridot, Pearl, had offered to fuse with Lapis, she would have accepted and done the same to them. Just because Jasper is a bad person doesn’t make this justified. Jasper isn’t supposed to come off as ‘an abuser’. She’s a soldier who at first has no interest in the mission, until she gets a whiff of the person who supposedly destroyed her home. Jasper’s trauma resurfaces and the judgements she makes from their reflect that pain, and she spirals until she corrupts.
Lapis didn’t fuse for Steven, that was the last excuse for her actions she ever made, to get Steven to leave her to her devices. And characters lie, Lapis lying about the nature of her consent with Jasper means that we likely can’t trust anything she says about her intentions with Malachite. She wants to be the prison master. RS states as such. Jasper is not being abusive. Lapis is. I cannot stress this enough, in a podcast about Malachite, Rebecca Sugar says she didn’t do it for Steven.
You leave out another very important visual clue in Chile Tid; that Japser is cuffed and Lapis is the ball to her chain. Lapis is the ball to Jasper’s chains. This cannot be stressed enough. Jasper can’t abuse Lapis here Prisoners cannot hurt their captives. With such a massive power balance, trying to survive can’t be counted as abuse. All Jasper is trying to do is survive and escape, but Lapis’ powers contain her.
It’s also muddied next; Jasper isn’t the same after Malachite. She would never stoop to crawl back to someone for power before, she was self-reliant. Malachite and Lapis’ ill intent in Malachite re-shape Jasper; the things Jasper says to Lapis are also things abuse victims say to their abusers when they rely on them and want to avoid their wrath. When you are afraid of being hurt by the people who have your life in their hands. Jasper gets on her knees, she begs, because she knows Lapis is stronger than her. Malachite hurt her - but like we see in Earthlings, Jasper believes she deserves to be hurt. She doesn’t go back to Lapis to hurt her and she’s warped by the fusion, by Lapis’ abuse.
Combined with her HW indoctrination to believe she should be strong before anything else, she comes to the conclusion she should seek out power even if it destroys her. And Lapis’ ease with which she enters the fusion and fights to keep control are enough of an indicator to Jasper that Lapis will find it appealing to take her back - that Lapis will abuse her, but that’s ok, because then Jasper won’t feel like she’s worthless.
Lapis admits she hurt Jasper, and between SWI and AaS, Lapis has had time to love herself, find friends, and realise that, no, hurting people isn’t good. This isn’t ‘abuse victim blames self’. She’s smarter than that. RS has said that this is not the case. She refuses Jasper because 1) she decides to actively chose to do what she knows she should have done the first time 2) she understands she did something awful, that it was bad, and she feels bad for ever having done it. This is good growth and complex development. But it is also bookended by the fact the crew says ‘fuck trauma victims’s and has Lapis punt Jasper back into the ocean because they’re not sure how to deal with the broke character they now have on their hands.
Jasper’s actions after are absolutely not Good, but she does have good backing for them. For one, we know gems can’t be forced into a fusion. If a gem can’t consent, there will be no fusion. The only way to force it is whatever way the Diamonds used to create the Cluster. Probably not at the disposal of Jasper. Ocean Jasper fuses with Jasper because it’ll mean she’s out of the cage. she unfuses almost immediately because yay now she’s not in a cage anymore and can go off and do whatever it was she was compelled to do before.
Jasper does after Malachite try to hunt down and murder the CGs. No doubt. Just like the Diamonds try to. But she’s not following YD’s orders - because as we learn, Jasper isn’t YDs gem, and she will always follow that what she believes to be the will of her true Diamond, of whom she has been lied to. She is following orders. Win the war for PD.
While it’s easy to see this as some black action with no basis and 100% morally wrong, because the CGs are our protagonists, Jasper has in her mind 100% reason to do so. She’s a HW puppet, she believes in the DA because it tells her she has worth and so she buys into it to feel less worthless. And if what she believes is wrong, we should also have high contempt for the people that make someone believe this to be true. The war never ended for Jasper, a child soldier forced to take up arms in a fight she never chose to be in, infused with indoctrination since birth and never given the chance to be more, made for it and it alone. It is understandable why, in the wake of massive trauma in Malachite and the resurfacing of deep self hate and war wounds, that she reverts back to the mindless soldier, the brute; the whole planet re-traumatises her. She wants to kill the CGs because they killed her home, her sisters, her Diamond, her future. What Jasper does makes sense. The CGs acted in the same way, just the other way around - it’s implied the CGs dug up kindergardens and destroyed gems as they were born. Jasper’s hate makes sense - it is even justified. Who wouldn’t want to kill those who killed their whole world?
But also, like any victim of indoctrination and an authoritarian regime, the things she believes hurt her too. Her love of the Diamonds, of the order, means she is wrong in it’s eyes after Lapis traps her inside Malachite, hell, she is wrong when the war ends and she didn’t win it. It means when the CGs who you have been told are lesser beat you, you double down on the self hate, you project it outwards and hurt others - like the corrupted gems. And she lets corruption take her over because after the war, after Malachite, after being rejected by the corrupt Ocean Jasper, Jasper feels, truly, as if she deserves to suffer. Her belief in her self-hate and the righteousness of her suffering is compounded. Jasper got herself her - in text, though why she was written this way and how are completely separate issues and needless to say I am not a fan - but the road was laid for her. After Malachite, there wasn’t an option.
As an abuse victim, I feel for Jasper because at one point I felt the same way. I was worthless, I needed my abuser, without them I was nothing and if it hurt to be around them I was better there than alone. When they were gone I drank and drank and drank until nobody knew who I was anymore and yeah I hurt people, because how can you not when you’ve nobody to set you straight? Lapis reminds me of my abuser - but I also can see the good in her character. I liked her in AaS because it showed her growing and understanding, in a way my abuser never did. It was a shame that, even when RS says ‘Lapis was the abuser, this is her admitting and committing to change’, the fandom just...ignores it. Is committed to seeing the physical dichotomy as the true language of the show. Jasper is big and bad and loud. Lapis is small and soft. The argument ends there. Even the screen shot in your essay you use to show Lapis being ‘forced’ into the fusion is the shot of her with a strong, knowing, decisive expression. The expression used to convey that Lapis has a plan, and a bad one, and she will hurt someone.
So, seeing this character get shoved in a box hits close to home. A lot of victims want to see Jasper change because it’s vicarious - though we can’t heal, Jasper can, and maybe we can find solidarity there. But she’s constantly put below her abusers and left to rot for conveniences sake. People constantly deny the abuse she suffered because they don’t like her. Bad victims act out, and that means people don’t believe us. It hurts to watch. Plenty of people stopped watching because it was too much. Lapis’ behaviour hits too close to home for victims too - because yes, she does remind people of their abusers too. If we can’t ignore that in Jasper, we can’t ignore that in Lapis - especially when Lapis was meant to be the one inflicting the most pain.
Malachite was toxic, because Jasper was being hurt by Lapis who stoked her self-hate, and Lapis because she realised how much she would hurt people and it hurt her to do it. Both are awful situations to be in. To become someone you don’t recognise is trauma - what Lapis went through in Malachite wasn’t good, but her trauma wasn’t inflicted by Jasper, but by herself. RS statements support this. She had to trap somebody, anybody, and once she trapped Jasper she couldn’t stop because it felt good. And once Malachite was over, she realised just what she’d done.
This is how it is to Rebecca Sugar. Interviews, writings, musings and Podcasts about Jasper and Malachite and Lapis. I don’t care about Peridot and Lapis’ relationship so I won’t go into that, all I know is it gives me bad vibes and that’s it.
@lacetfavilla I am so glad that we play in the same team. You would be a horrifying enemy to face.
Holy damn but this is all true. At least you can put it into words where my rage fails lmao
Agreed, hot damn. We should compare notes some time.
