Alright. So while we’re all thinking about Steven Universe again I wanna talk about something I’ve been thinking about for a while
I don’t like that the gems are human-shaped. Like, I get why they are from a design standpoint - and specifically as a children’s show. I don’t even dislike the designs! I just. Am insane about speculative biology and aliens. I would like them to be weirder. So I will make them weirder
(Now, take this whole thing with a grain of salt because it has been a very long time since I’ve actually watched Steven Universe and a lot of the lore is a bit fuzzy to me.)
Ok! Disclaimers aside, let’s get into it!
So, (if I’m remembering right) there are three key facts pertaining to the appearance of gems:
Gems’ physical bodies are projections of/from their gems.
These projections are heavily influenced by their mental state and identity, and are capable of not only being subconsciously influenced, but also consciously influenced.
Gems are capable of extremely accurate mimicry.
This means their appearance could basically be anything.
Homeworld gems tend to have elaborate, inorganic crystalline forms. Especially in high-ranking gems, there’s a lot of posturing involved. Their forms are just barely even function, capable of completing the tasks they were assigned and all else dedicated to looking pretty and complicated and wholly inorganic.
Gems created in kindergartens would be the exact opposite, especially when they first crawled out of the ground. Their forms would be built to dig and… not really anything else at first. As they get older they become more specialized, their bodies evolving to suit their assignments - and eventually adding whatever personal flair they can get away with (which really isn’t much). This is why gems of the same type tend to look nearly identical.
It’s also possible for - and actually likely that they would mimic things that they really like, or otherwise had a great influence on them. Friends may begin to look like twins over time. Curious kindergartners may look like some strange life form that caught their eye, before they learned it was a very bad idea to express any sort of affection for such beasts. Lapises and aquamarines often look like living water.
It makes sense, then, that the Crystal Gems looked like humans. But what if they didn’t? What if they looked like tigers or herons? Flowers or frogs? Isopods, trees, squid, extinct megafauna, or any of the incredible, bizarre organisms that shared Earth with them!
This is also why I think corrupted gems look the way they do; animalistic and strange, that is. They don’t know what they’re supposed to look like. They hardly know who they are. How are they supposed to make themselves a form with no knowledge of themself? Well, mimicry. They mimicked the creatures they saw on Earth, but not super well because honestly perfect mimicry isn’t really what they were going for anyway.
Now, imagine if you could pick anything, anything at all, what you would look like. Imagine a gem who looks like their mental picture of a strange creature from an old myth. Imagine a gem that looks like an ever-flowing sheet of rain. Imagine a gem that looks like a miniature nebula. Imagine a gem that looks like a waveform of their favorite song. Imagine a gem that looks like a sunset in a storm cloud. Imagine a gem that’s an amalgam of all they’ve ever loved - people, creatures, places, things.
So, yeah. More fucked up gems please
