So basically this has been running around in the back of my head, and going to fully explore it here today:
There seems to be a relative pattern with how gems look, at least thus far with the characters we know. First and foremost we have the tumbled gems like Lapis Lazuli, Peridot and Pearl. All of them are smooth and rounded in some way, just like the more common gems you would find in a store.
Lapis Lazuli, Peridot and Pearl are all non-combative gems, they seem to have less to do with fighting and more of their specialty. Lapis controls water, and seems to have no physical weapon. Peridot almost seems to have a control on magnetism and uses their floating fingers for most of their combat. They seem completely new to combat in general. Pearl’s lyrics:
Deep down you know
You weren't built for fighting
But that doesn't mean
You're not prepared to try
With that and the way she refers to herself as just a Pearl and other comments seems to denote a service class.
Then there are the cut gems, those that seem purposely cut like we tend to do with more valuable gems. These have their own categories, from triangle cut like sapphire’s gem, to square cut gems like ruby’s gem, to pentagon cut gems like Steven’s/Rose’s gem, to hexagon cut gem’s like amethyst’s gem and then the odd ball cut of Jasper’s being pyramid.
Sapphire, Ruby, Amethyst are all faceted and cut gems. They all have the similar shape of round with different amount of sides to the facet. So the respective shapes it makes in the center I will refer to. My first impression was that the number of sides denoted more power. Then I noted that Rose Quartz’s and Steven’s gem are a pentagon compared to Amethyst’s hexagon. Now I begin to wonder if its just different classes and positions for each different shape. Perhaps Diamond actually refers to the type of cut, or position rather then the actual type of gem.
Last we have only seen from corrupted and captured gems, natural and unnatural gem states. First and most obvious would be Centipeedle, and their strange gem form. Other gems captured have other unusual shapes and man-made shaped like Bismuth. The rest are mostly quartz points and natural formations of crystals.
Do corrupted gems take particular forms?
So, I think that there might be a type of ritual or coming of age thing for gems where they get cut/shaped. The idea of which honestly gave me chills at first, but I can’t fathom how gems would be grown but look exquisitely cut. Maybe corruption happened when grown gems where coming out of Kindergarden, before they go through the ceremony of getting cut.
Strange racists and homophobes on the internet seem to have access to an alternate way cooler version of TV than me. "every white character on TV is in an interracial relationship" "every show has a gay couple in it" "main characters keep having to secretly be bisexual and nonbinary" "every show has gratuitous full frontal nudity" like damn promise?? What channel???
for real though, those DO NOT WATCH OR YOU'LL CORRUPT YOUR CHILDREN lists put out by conservative christian family groups is where I find all the stellar tv shows. Like, shit I didn't know half of those existed, thanks for finding them for me, gonna go watch 30 hours of gay tv now!
For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.
So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?
Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?
Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.
Same as the journalists describing Black Rock City as all naked. Same as the right-wing religious culture warriors describing television as entirely mixed-race and gender non-conforming. Not because it's even vaguely true, we know that, but because they haven't gotten over their discomfort over the last one by the time the next one comes along. The anger, not the stimulus, is the part that's continuous, so their mind lies to them that it's "all" the thing they can't get over.
Similar effect for the presence/proportion of women in things, by the way: https://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/human-nature/perception/how-17-equals-496-the-amazing-multiplying-women.htm
