(Or, bellsingur re-examines her unconscious beliefs)

SO through a quick skim of Ao3 College AU, I found that a majority of people would headcanon Peridot as a Engineering Major (Electrical, Biological, Mechanical, etc), and to a lesser extent, a Computer Science Major.

Makes sense. When we first see Peridot, she’s got all these cool tech things. She has cool artificial limbs. She does cool tech things. She builds and fixes things.

So most of us immediately categorize her as a typical science and math minded nerd. Peridot’s smart, she’s logical and analytical, she’s a technician.

The more we know about her, like once we find out she’s a Kindergartener, we modify our perception of her a bit, but it remains the mostly the same.

(Assuming everyone had the same thought process as me, sorry)

But here’s the thing: Though Peridot might be good at, yeah, engineering and technology, it seems her passion is nurturing things. Nurturing life, making gems, planting. She relates her job as a Kindergartener to farming, probably in that it both requires growing things.

She would actually likely be an Agricultural Sciences major (imagine her social media full of farming memes lol), maybe even Obstetrics or Child Development Psychology.

And I love that.

When we think of nurturing, we think of children and mothering and all these soft and gentle emotions. Characteristics like kind and affectionate. We think of Rose and Steven (plant superpowers too), of Pearl. Delicate and more on the feminine side of things. When we think of plant-lovers, they’re loving of all life and caring. Balls of sunshine.

Peridot…is not. She’s brash and arrogant, she’s all logic and rationality, she’s grumpy, she seems to tend towards the more hard science side of things. When I - shallowly, without much consideration - think of her as a Child Development Psychologist, it’s like…will she act just like the kids, or will she make them cry? She’s not maternal, she’s not feminine in the way we think of Pearl and Rose, say. (Again, assuming most everyone fell into the same mental trap I did).

Tvtropes lists this trope for Peridot:

But the actual trope name is Caring Gardener.

Yet.

Peridot is nothing if not a very serious and hard worker. She’s determined and she takes lots of pride in her job and doing it right. She was very committed to the Kindergartens, which she once saw as the generator of life. She cultivates a whole plot of farmland and those plants look very healthy and fresh. She wants to protect all life to the point of defecting her Homeworld.

I’ve gotten used to plants everywhere. Bugs and breeze and sunshine…



The definition of ‘nurturing’ is just: “care for and encourage the growth or development of”. Peridot might not act in the image of what we think ‘caring’ looks like (but that might speak deeper about how we as a society views acceptable expressions of ‘caring’), but she’s exactly that. Caring and encouraging of growth. A nurturer. And a good, dedicated one at that.

She’s the true mom of the show.

I feel victim to a lot of stereotypes, ones indirectly, but at its one of its cores, about gender roles and traits. I thought ‘logical and calculating’ = technology and hard sciences, masculine, and in the opposite side of things, ‘emotions and caring’ = caregiving and soft sciences, feminine. “Haha, Peridot is a Kindergartener, what a silly name; Peridot is a farmer, what a weird hobby. Haha, Peridot is a mechanic, not a midwife.”

She’s both. That’s who she is, all that and more, a complex individual with distinct personality, worldview, hobbies, passions, that needn’t to align with the categories we construct in our minds.

Thank you, Steven Universe, and Rebecca Sugar, for exploring the possibilities.