5: It hardcaps gem capabilities at well below what gems are actually capable of.

I don’t even just mean White Diamond herself, though powering a temple is treated like a much bigger deal than it really is - but these gems can hollow out an entire planet. The best they can do for one of their leaders is some big pyramid, a single core trap and a few carvings on the walls?

I mean, they don’t even hide OG that well. Any brute quartz could have busted through that floor, which Rose Quartz was probably capable of. The primary trap actually lures people TO the gem, as well. And in a world where they can produce time-travelling devices and infinitely replicate things, a gravity-flip powered by the gem just isn’t that massive.

4: Isn’t Gem Power a punishment?

This always seems to slip peoples minds when they talk about this. For gems, being used as a power source practically removes your rights as a being. But for this scenario and this scenario only, it’s treated as an honourable send-off. Yeah, no, I’m not biting. If it’s punishing and dehumanizing even to a Lapis Lazuli, it’s still going to be punishing and de-humanizing to White Diamond.

3: It makes Yellow Diamond look like a bluh bluh huge bitch, even to her comrade. There’s no scenario I can think of where it’s a logical place to put a Diamond.

In Message Received, YD has a smile on her face as she talks about destroying earth with the cluster. And I just can’t see her doing that with a “treasured equal” on the planet that she still respects enough to keep on the logo.

Not to mention, the very presence of the mural means that at the time of OG’s death, recording knowledge of earth was still important - they hadn’t initiated Project Fuck This Planet yet, ‘cos you wouldn’t bother recording stuff on the walls if you were gonna blow up the tomb later.

And the tomb makes no sense whether or not it was a crystal gem or a homeworld structure, or whether or not it was meant to be displayed or hidden.

- If it was a CG structure, then why would Pearl/Garnet not know how it was defended? If this really was White Diamond’s tomb, made by CGs, then surely Rose Quartz would have known how to navigate it. And entombing WD does make sense for hiding or for display - deep in a key-sealed tomb, but right next to a warp pad?

- If it was a Homeworld Structure, then it doesn’t match with either wanting to hide it or wanting to display it. If they were hiding it, they wouldn’t put it so near a warp pad in a big, intimidating tomb, they’d, y’know hide it. And if they were displaying it, then they could do a lot better than just kinda near a warp pad in a big, intimidating tomb. Why not atop a spire or something?

For either side, it’s both not prominently located nor is it well-defended enough from possible enemy interference.

2: The theory has almost never had anything concrete to support it. In fact, right now it’s got only one thing that can’t be challenged in-show…

See the above points about assuming too little of homeworld, for a start. Then add on that:

People regularly assume that The Four Diamonds are on Three of Five mural panels.



People regularly make a massive deal of the power, like creating solid matter out of energy isn’t hard, like gems haven’t created invisible hard-light creatures or living islands.



Pearl and Garnet don’t react to the gem at all, which means either it’s not White Diamond or they already knew it was, in which case why leave it five thousand years to collect WHITE DIAMOND?

to collect WHITE DIAMOND? Judging by the mere presence of a tomb recording history, this gem’s corruption categorically cannot have been what caused Yellow Diamond and co. going “Yep going to erase everything about this planet ever”.



Nobody in the mural of the Pyramid resembles anybody in the mural of the Moon Base, where Earth’s planning occurred, which means that Moon Mural is presumably how the Diamonds looked at the start of the colonization…

And it really doesn’t seem like it had anything going for it in the first place.

The one bastion is that Pyramid Gem’s gem is similar to Yellow Diamond’s. That’s an actually strong piece of evidence… but even this can be disproven. Jasmin Lai’s work shows that Yellow Diamond’s gem is meant to be a Diamond shape, like Blue Diamond or the shapes on the walls of the moon base. It can be assumed that the shape we see in show is due to Yellow Diamond’s curved chest, making the gem’s perspective squish. Things do look stouter when viewed at an angle, after all.

1: In spite of this lack of evidence, people take it as a certainty that this is White.

Here’s where it really gets me. Really, Stevenbomb Four provided TONS more evidence that WD =! OG than the other way. But people still assume that she is. Heck, there’s tonnes of theories which take OG = WD for granted, and build on it a LONG way. Heck, people build elaborate theories to explain why the Pyramid Murals don’t resemble the Moon Murals, rather than the obvious being that they display two different people. Why would Yellow Diamond have a form where she loses her neck and arms, and just gets more spiky hair?

Honestly, the Mural Gems have a much better chance of being Diamond Champions/Earth Representatives than they have being Diamonds. I mean, we see Two in nearly identical panels, (A white gem in a handy panel, and a yellow one in a Sun Panel), and two more panels which seem to match the remaining gems (a panel with pink quartz in it like many depictions of Rose and PD, and a blue panel with what appears to be a moon at the top). But now I’m spitballing off into a tangent.

I mean, just because they have the same connotations and colours as their diamonds doesn’t mean they aren’t their own beings. How often is it only the boss of anything which carries their connotations? Most of their followers will often have the same trends in symbols and powers, and in a galaxy-spanning empire are you telling me they ONLY make statues/murals of the people at the very very very top?

But people often assume that any statue or whatever is a Diamond. Which ties into my final point.

NOTE: I DIDN’T INCLUDE THIS FINAL POINT IN THE COUNT BECAUSE IT IS NOT A GOOD REASON TO BE DISSATISFIED WITH WHITE DIAMOND = OG SPECIFICALLY. IT IS A REASON TO CRITICIZE MULTIPLE “=DIAMOND” THEORIES USING ALL OR MOST OF THE UNUSUAL GEMS - LAPIS, LG, OG, AND ROSE. I GENERALLY APPLY IT TO OG SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE THAT’S THE LEAST EVIDENCED ONE, BUT IT IS NOT, ON IT’S OWN, A GOOD REASON.

0: The trend to assume any gem with a unique experience is a Diamond is kinda the point of the whole show to criticize.

This.

This so, so much.

Homeworld’s entire problem is that they only treat Diamonds and high-ranking gems as having unique experiences worth recording.

A vast number of theorisers assume that the two gems with seemingly the most unique experiences - Lighthouse Gem and Obelisk Gem - are diamonds or parts of diamonds.

You see the problem, right? The entire point of the show is to say that everyone’s experience is unique, interesting, and worth talking about, every life is as precious and important as any other.

And yet… so many people don’t apply that to the gems we’ve seen. So many go “Oh, you’re a gem with a unique experience worth talking about? Well, you’re coloured blue/white so you MUST be blue/white diamond! Obviously!”

There is no way we’ve gotten an entire perspective on the gem world yet. So, so many more voices need to be heard, all the way up to the other diamonds and all the way down to the Heaven and Earth Beetles. So that people try to wrap the “important” or “interesting” gems as Diamonds wherever possible just rubs me the wrong way. It seems to forget that the whole point of the show is that you don’t have to be a Diamond to be important. Heck, it’s worse than Homeworld’s interpretation of importance!

On a more personal level, I also don’t like the assertions that Homeworld has nothing more to step it up with. This is more a personal thing, but so many people think that now we’ve seen Lapis and Yellow Diamond, that every other Diamond will be corrupted or in storage or w/e. It just… doesn’t seem interesting to me.

But regardless, the fact remains that in spite of overwhelmingly dodgy evidence, people assume and have assumed that Obelisk Gem is White Diamond, merely because of how interesting it is and how much “more interesting” it would be if she really was a Diamond. And that just frustrates me.