the gem she ‘tortured’ had been emotionally and physically abusing her the entire time they were together: she grabbed her by her arm, and dragged and threw her around like a doll, yelling in her face, and then tried to use her war trauma to manipulate her into killing her only friend. standing up to your abuser is not abuse. fighting back against someone who’s attacking you and treating you like garbage is not wrong. (also, jasper was pretty insane beforehand anyways. lotta’ baggage there.)
i don’t know where you got the emotional manipulation from, though. all she’s ever done is told people the facts (that the crystal gems hurt her, that the earth would be dangerous with the diamonds etc) and let them make whatever decision they would based on that. even if she reacted negatively to their response, she never used manipulation to try to change them.
emotional manipulation requires the intentional misuse or obstruction of information, or using some kind of emotional attachment as bait to get someone to do what you want. she hasn’t done any of that. plus, all of these actions were made out of concern for safety; it wasn’t her own personal desire. she genuinely thought these people were in danger and was trying to warn them.
she accepted fault for her actions and expressed remorse for them, like when she showed guilt for hurting greg in ‘alone at sea’ and talked about how awful she felt about how she treated jasper. honestly, every gem has done something just as bad as her, sometimes even worse - like when pearl almost let steven fall to his death. peridot tried to kill them all numerous times too, but it’s kinda’ brushed aside because it was done in a more cartoonish way.
peridot never apologized, but you did see her feel remorse for it, and you saw her character grow in such a way that you knew she wouldn’t hurt anyone intentionally again. the same goes for lapis, but on top of everything else she’s dealing with thousands of years worth of intensive ptsd and emotional scarring, so her development is a little more wonky.
this is actually why she’s popular among fans; recovery and healing is not always a smooth ride upwards. in reality, it’s far more common that people struggle with the process for years, even decades. she speaks to a lot of people who are recovering from situations similar to hers, and considering that her character itself is based on a comic rebecca sugar made about a bad relationship she was in, it’s doubtless that rebecca put her in the show for people to connect and relate to.
if you don’t relate to her, that’s fine, but making her out to be this horrible, cruel-hearted demon is innacurate at best. i know the phrase ‘complex character’ is thrown around a lot but that’s really all she is, no more and no less than everyone else in the show. she only gets singled out because she’s a more down-to-earth and gritty representation of what depression and ptsd are really like, and how those things effect your personality and decision making, which a lot of people can’t understand, or find tedious and boring, when for a lot of other people, it’s their reality.
dailybridgerton
tangentwithtanner
germansingergirl
romaincrisis
janainaart
snowghoul
baratheonpilled
