Is Peridot an unintentional archivist, records manager, or something else entirely? [Part 1]
Peridot, shown in her debut episode "Warp Tour," making a log of her trip to Earth and what she saw while she was there.
So, I recently began rewatching Steven Universe, starting at season 1, and I realized even more archival themes than what I had previously concluded, beginning with one of the characters, Peridot. Some readers may remember I wrote about Steven Universe before, at the beginning of this year, noting the presence of VCRs, their preservation, other records within the series, the special library of Buddy Buddwick, and archival records used in defense of Steven at his trial, to name a few aspects.
Reprinted from my Wading Through the Cultural Stacks WordPress blog. Originally published on Dec. 2, 2021.
However, I was mainly relying on memory in writing that post, and its different once you begin watching a series again. As such, this post will be focused on one specific character, Peridot, and whether she is an unintentional archivist, records manager, or something else entirely in the series as a whole. Warning here that this post will give spoilers for part of the show.
In episodes within seasons 1 and 2 of Steven Universe, Peridot often records her progress with Gem experimentation and the cluster on her "finger screens." She is first shown making logs in her debut episode [Warp Tour] and makes another log in the episode "Keeping it Together," before Steven, and his friends, the Crystal Gems, chase her across the Prime Kindergarten. [1] Unfortunately, her screens and limb enhancements are thrown into the water in the episode "Catch and Release" by Amethyst. In the following episode, "When it Rains," she tells Steven she doesn't know anything without her screen and tells him that all her logs up to a certain date are backed up in the Prime Kindergarten. She also tells Steven she read over a few hundred years of reports and displays her records which show many attempts at artificial fusion, prototypes for an artificial fusion that would have destroyed the Earth, the Cluster.
Following this, she gets an audio tape recorder, making logs for her life on Earth, her experiences, her attempts to get along with the Crystal Gems (Amethyst, Garnet, and Pearl), and more. [2] This until the episode "Barn Mates" when Lapis destroys it after Peridot gifts it to her in hopes of becoming friends with her. The audio tape recorder becomes an important part of her character development as she adapts to living on Earth rather than living on Homeworld. In the process, you could say that the recordings that Peridot does are archival records.
As I noted in my previous post about Steven Universe on this blog, Peridot notes that she had backed up her logs before, finding information on Gem fragments from reports. In the episode "It Could've Been Great" she goes through an old Gem computer system to find information about the cluster, Gem locations, and the planned Earth colony. The question remains, is Peridot an archivist, albeit unintentionally? That is what I want to answer in the rest of this post, divided into two parts. The second part will be published tomorrow.
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Notes
[1] Peri is using communication devices in "Friend Ship" as well.
[2] This shown in the episodes "Log Date 7 5 12" and "Barn Mates" for instance.
