I know I’m cannonballing into the discourse pool here, but I think Jasper continuing to play an antagonistic role in the epilogue makes perfect sense because she has the one problem that Steven’s super-empathy powers can’t address: namely, that she’s a sadist. Whatever justifications she offers aside, it’s pretty clear that she likes hurting and humiliating people – she may not take any particular pleasure in it, but it’s how she affirms her basic self-image.



The problem is, you can’t fix a sadist with empathy, because hurting people is the whole point. Making them understand that they’re hurting people just confirms for them that they’re doing a good job, and making them understand how they’re hurting people just shows them how to do that job more effectively. Indeed, effective sadists are often deeply empathetic people themselves – they just use their powers for evil.

I mean, yeah, we’ve seen (parts of) her backstory, she’s not just evil for no reason, but the reason she’s been such an effective recurring villain is because she deliberately cuts against the show’s basic thesis: in a story where every other villain hurts people because they don’t truly understand the pain they’re causing or they’re too wrapped up in their own pain to care, Jasper takes her understanding of other people’s pain and turns it into a weapon.

I think this underscores that if there’s to be any sort of redemption arc for her, it’s going to have to happen on her own terms, because there’s nothing she lacks that’s standing in her way – at least, not anything that any of the other characters can give her.



(I half-suspect this is why they’re pairing her up with Aquamarine. Aquamarine has the same basic impulse toward cruelty, but lacks the emotional intelligence to understand how to hurt people effectively. With Jasper to point her at a target, she could be legitimately scary!)

