A Half-Gem’s Reaction to Asphyxiation

I’ve not seen anybody comment on this except me, so I’m going to take the opportunity to talk about something cool instead of tedious.

So this is the second time we’ve seen Steven basically asphyxiate to death. The first time was in Warp Tour. By all indications, he does seem to need to breathe, but he doesn’t need it anywhere near as urgently as a regular human would. It would make sense for him to go far further on much less air than someone without the Gem components.

I don’t think this scene was him just curling up out of despair or exhaustion. From the looks of it, it seems like after having popped his bubble and let the remaining air out to discard Eyeball, he’s finally beginning to suffocate.

Note that he didn’t seem this exhausted when he was just fighting her off or sending her away. It seems like a result of having lost the oxygen he was keeping inside his bubble. He seems to pass out not long after that. The bubble shrinks, and he doesn’t move until the gems pull him into the spaceship sometime later. From the slow pan out, it seems like it’s implying he could have been curled up like that for a fair while. Definitely way longer than he would have had the air to sustain him, but it’s pretty clear he’s not functioning WITHOUT air either.

He’s unconscious when they bring him in, and Garnet is calling for him and jostling him when he finally wakes up. I think this might be because, as a half gem, when the organic part of his body begins to fail, he may just go into a stasis until his organic parts can function again. In this case, when he’s given air. It even looks like he’s bubbling himself, like the gems held in stasis within the temple. I wonder if he would have stayed in stasis if the gems hadn’t popped the bubble?

This is something that makes a lot of sense when applied to something like asphyxiation, but it makes me really curious if his body would react in in a similar manner to other kind of potentially fatal injury. From this looks of this scenario, it feels likely to me that when one half of his biology can’t function, the other half will shut down too until it can. This is probably what might happen without something like food, too.

I’m not sure if we’ll ever see how he recoops from more visceral injuries, but I just thought this was a really interesting glance at how his human parts might deal with things Gems could survive without.





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