I've seen some people look at Pearl and Lapis and think they may share certain characteristics and share certain parallels (the most obvious being the "let me do this for you" thing). Do you think there's any strong similarities or parallels between the two of them?

anonymous

Hmm… As it stands, I don’t know if there’s much similarity between them besides that line, and I think that even then, there’s a difference to how they play it.

When Pearl voices the line, it’s a question (“Why won’t you let me do this for you?”) and it’s rooted in the fact that Pearl has a sort of perception bias to thinking of herself as worthless, pathetic, replaceable. She believes she never means as much to the people around her as they mean to her, and it’s not completely logical, but it’s a persistent fixture of her thinking.

This can also lead her to believe that nothing she’s able to do can actually hurt the people around her- which is something she’s run into in Rose’s Scabbard, On The Run and the Week of Sardonyx- most actively discussed in Friend Ship.

But Pearl’s attitude in Sworn To The Sword is if she can prove she’s suffering for Rose’s cause that suffering will make her meaningful in her relationship to Rose. If she’s willing to throw away everything she has for this, then it means she’s the Most Loyal, right? Except it also has some truly devastating implications about her self-image, except it’s not remotely what Rose wants, and there’s resistance. But the thing that drove Pearl to do this also causes her to read this resistance as proof that she’s really not valuable to Rose, that her attempt to become valuable is being refused and pushed down.

Pearl’s is, more or less, “I want to prove that I’m worthy of your love. Why won’t you let me do that?”

Now, Lapis’s callback of the line in Chille Tid. It has a very different tone, and very different mentality behind it. To me, I feel like the similarities between the line highlight differences between Lapis and Pearl more than they do similarities.

Lapis speaks this as an order (“Just let me do this for you!”) and voices it as part of a string of reasons why Steven should stop trying to help her and stop hunting Malachite. Compared to Pearl who is leaning backwards, tearfully, arms open as she gestures expressively with this, Lapis is leaned forwards, shoulders hunched, eyes dry and brow furrowed. Her tone is snappy and commanding.

As far as I can tell, Lapis has never done anything to prove herself for Steven. She’s even being disingenuous about Malachite. A lot of people take the “let me do this for you” line as evidence that Lapis did it to protect Steven, but it really doesn’t add up.

When Lapis actively made the decision to drag Malachite under, her statement was “I’m sick of being everyone’s prisoner. Now you’re my prisoner, and I’m never letting you go! Let’s stay on this miserable planet together!”

Steven is nowhere in it. He’s not even implied. It is exclusively about Lapis and her feelings and Jasper as something Lapis is going to act on. And given Jasper was trying to fuse in the first place because she was clearly on her last legs and facing odds she couldn’t win against, Lapis didn’t really need to do anything to protect Steven, especially not fuse. She could’ve taken out Jasper pretty darn easily on her own.

Malachite’s motivation was, in one way, spite, and in another way, Lapis as someone who is both used to the idea of power but has spent a long time feeling like her power is ripped away from her. It’s Lapis deciding she’s going to make her stand and decisively take her situational power back, and punish the person who keeps dragging her into this situation and pushing her around.

It’s a culmination of the first interaction we saw between Jasper and Lapis- Jasper pulling Lapis forwards like ragdoll and Lapis’s reflexive, unspoken “How dare you lay a hand on me.”

In Chille Tid Lapis repeatedly tells Steven to go away. She never asks him if he’s okay, or visibly can be seen checking on him. It’s only as he continues to come after her and talk to her that she suddenly, without any prior evidence that this was a factor, produces that line that calls to mind self-sacrifice and utter selflessness, to destructive and unhealthy degrees.

If Lapis actually held that mentality towards Steven, she would not have hung back and let Peridot and Jasper shoot at him without even looking in his direction. I don’t say this to demonize Lapis- I say this because she had clear priorities. Not conflicting with the emissaries of modern Homeworld and thus securing a way back home were more important to her than the person that she’d known for a short period of time. He was nice to her, he helped her out, and she tried to help him. She warned him to surrender, or at least not to fight back, which gave him plenty of opportunity to clear out and he insisted on being there anyway, something she was surprised and a little alarmed to see.

So, all right, he’s seemingly spit on her help, there doesn’t seem to be much incentive for her to stick her neck out and save him. She doesn’t go “well forget you” and tell Jasper and Peridot all about him- she sticks by her earlier lies, even when he blows his own cover.

Lapis is calculating, and to a degree, Lapis plays people. And this makes sense because Lapis operates from two assumptions. First, in stark contrast to Pearl, Lapis is obviously used to thinking of herself as important. She’s used to the feeling of being in charge and she tries to take charge- friends or enemies, her response to them is that she wants to lead this interaction. With Steven, she wants to decide that they’re going to Homeworld, that he should leave, that he shouldn’t trust the Crystal Gems, that he shouldn’t fight back against Homeworld. She doesn’t really tolerate much argument or disagreement and tends to go “oh well forget you, if you won’t listen to my idea.” very quickly.

The other part of this is Lapis is in a really dark place in her life right now. Not much is guaranteed and she was held prisoner for a very long time. She falls into a survivalist mentality- only pick the fights you’re sure you can win, if you have to make a stand make it where it will have the greatest possible effect, but otherwise keep your head down, play submissive, play it subtle. This is what I mean when I don’t say this to demonize Lapis- Lapis is operating on survivalism. Things do not feel okay or safe for Lapis and they haven’t really since before Mirror Gem. Now, after Super Watermelon Island, we may be getting there, but it’s still telling that Lapis’s first response to realizing she’s in the company of the Crystal Gems is that she wants to get away from them.

Judging by the promos, she was going to try and leave in the night without actually talking to anyone.

Lapis does not feel safe. And combined with her sense of self-importance, this leads to her making many controlling and manipulative choices because to Lapis, this is a way to guarantee safety. She doesn’t feel like she has anyone she trusts all that much besides herself. She likes Steven, and she’s sort of trusted him a few times, but he’s kind of a wild card. He’s deeply sympathetic to her enemies, having been raised by them on their planet, and she doesn’t really have a good meter for what part he’ll listen to her on and what part he’ll act as an either willing or unwitting agent of the Crystal Gems.

She honestly hasn’t spent that much time with him and doesn’t know him that well.

So I guess, narratively, it almost would seem as if Lapis is deliberately invoking the ideas behind Pearl’s statement, but her actual motives for saying so are completely different. (I say it would almost seem, because Lapis wasn’t there for Sworn To The Sword and doesn’t know Pearl said that, so this is kind of a meta moment) This does tie in with Lapis’s ability to animate reflections and, thus, parrot others, which she used in Mirror Gem to communicate and convey ideas.