You know, looking back at these latest episodes it really strikes me as amazing that I didn’t realize that Steven was an empath before.

Steven is sympathetic, that’s not something we ever doubted for a moment. We always knew he could understand the feelings of others better than almost anyone else around, even if he didn’t understand the situation or circumstances, but there’s a difference between between sympathy and empathy, at least when we’re discussing psychic powers.

Sympathy is a mundane thing. One can understand, relate to and predict the emotions of others because you know them or care about them even if you don’t really know them or even like them.

Empathy on the other hand (the psychic power, not the emotion) is supernatural. It’s the low-key telepathic ability to pick up and process the emotions of others, even if you don’t sympathize with them or even know that they’re present. It’s why Steven and Steven alone felt Blue Diamond’s sorrow before he even knew she was there.

It’s been hinted at before that Steven’s ability to connect to other people went above and beyond the mundane. Remember in Gem Drill when Steven freaked out because he subconsciously felt the Cluster’s pain and fear? Remember how he knew they didn’t want to form but he didn’t understand how?

The interesting thing is that being a hybrid whose mind is in his brain and not in his gem, Steven can’t really process these feelings directly, and as a result will do things like pass out or start crying without even noticing that he’s feeling these things. Rose on the other hand seemed to experience things more directly

Garnet: Steven, your mother had healing tears that flowed from her gem. She felt real love for those around her. She felt real sorrow when they were hurt.



In retrospect, being an empath seems to be a necessary secondary power for Rose Quartz to have. If your ability to heal others requires you to cry over them, you had better hope you can literally feel their pain

This is a bit off track since I’m doing a character exposition, but given how important being a kind of telepath is to rose’s most major abilities, I think it’s safe to say that Steven’s other psychic powers like dreamwalking and body snatching did originally belong to Rose Quartz (hence, Pink Diamond couldn’t have stolen Rose’s body. if it happened, it was the other way around).

Knowing the extent of their empathy, I have to wonder whether Stevonnie – being as powerful as a true rose quartz – would be able to act as a reverse-empath and force their emotions and fusion hallucinations in the heads of their opponents

Anyway, getting back to Rose and Empathy, this is getting a bit interesting, because despite all of the emotions rose could feel, it’s been all but explicitly stated that Rose was incapable of romantic love. The entire plot of We Need To Talk was that Rose loved Greg and Pearl but wasn’t in love with them. She had no idea what being in love felt like, and as a result couldn’t understand the pain either of them felt when she Greg realized he was just a fling to her or when she cheated on Pearl with all those men she sang about in Mr. Greg

Rose is aromantic (or at least I think that’s the right term). For whatever reason, she can’t “learn how to love like you,” and thus is unable to either sympathize or empathize with that emotion. For humans this is nothing to be ashamed of (though we make a habit of being ashamed anyway), but for Rose Quartzes, who are engineered with the supernatural ability to share emotions directly, this is for all intents and purposes a major functional defect.

I’m not sure I have anything else I want to say about this, I just thought it’s really interesting and organizes Steven and Rose’s powers a lot more neatly than they were before.