We Need to Talk: Greg- "Do you ever miss your home planet?" Rose - (without hesitation) "No, never." Rose doesn't seem to be lying or burying her feelings; she seems completely sincere. But why is SHE the only one who DOESN'T miss her home planet when Pearl clearly does (she misses space, possibly the grandeur, wants to see what they're doing "without me") and Peridot laments not having MORE feelings for her home in Gem Drill?

anonymous

This doesn’t sound at all like Rose trying to dodge the topic, given just a little while ago she told Greg it was a good thing he didn’t know anything about her?

Rose deliberately brought up Homeworld in Rose’s Scabbard. “If we lose, we die, and even if we win, we can never go home again.”

I really doubt Rose is being honest about that. It’s a very straightforwards question and it’s very, very easily deflected.

Furthermore, Rose’s room, which had to have been built after the war, is the one that’s able to recreate things from Rose’s memories and is programmed to urgently try to give its user what they want. Seemingly, Rose spent a fair amount of time in there, in Story For Steven when she came out of the room she was visibly distraught.

Why would Rose, if she is speaking truly and doesn’t miss or regret anything, have a room that’s literally built to give you things that you want, but can’t have in real life? After all the room’s imitations are limited in several obvious ways. They’re an inferior replacement for real people and places, so if you could actually go to that place and do that thing, you wouldn’t use the room for that.

But Rose built that room. Rose specifically made a room to do exactly that, presumably because she desperately wanted that.

We’ve already used the analogy of a rose-tinted perspective with Connie and her pink glasses, that she knocks the lenses out of when she begins to realize that staying close to Steven may ask difficult things to her- lying to her parents to protect that friendship- but look at Rose’s room. All soft pink clouds, an immaterial, dreamlike world where everything is soft and friendly, and all it wants to do is make you happy.

It overwhelmingly seems to evoke a sense of nostalgia. And here’s the thing about Rose: We know that she keeps secrets. She was just earlier trying to deter Greg from getting to know her more. And in part it seems to be rooted in the fact that Rose tries very, very hard to seem sort of airy and inconsequential.

Rose is a very sharp person. She doesn’t really understand people’s feelings, but she’s charismatic and she knows what to say. And she acts in a very flippant manner sometimes.

“Who cares what I feel? How you feel is bound to be more interesting.” Rose acknowledges that she does have feelings about this but immediately glosses them over and never acknowledges what those feelings are, besides being interested in Garnet. With Greg, she presents herself as flirtatious and giggly and in some ways superficial. She keeps things shallow because she really, really does not want to divulge her actual feelings. Either because she thinks other people wouldn’t be able to deal with it, or genuinely because she doesn’t want to burden them.

I feel like Rose’s facade slips much more when we see her first emerge from her room in Story For Steven to tell Greg to go chase his dreams and leave her alone. Here, we see a Rose who is a little more somber, not to the point of unhappiness but because she’s been around this before. Greg is cute, and charming, and she likes him, but she knows that overwhelmingly, odds are she will vastly outlive him. And a part of her really doesn’t want to do that to him- have him spend his whole life with her, and have her just use him up, like a toy. Because at that point, and in We Need To Talk, it really wasn’t that serious to Rose. It was just a game.

Rose is someone who’s seen war, who turned on everything she knew and stayed on Earth. And as much as she wanders out of the temple and attends concerts, we also see that the Gem Temple in her day was fenced off.

Rose’s connection to humanity was very unlike Steven’s. She’d go, she’d play with them, but she had zero intention of letting them that close. She maybe justified it for their sake, but ultimately, she really didn’t want to. And it’s most likely that Rose participated in putting up that sign as there are two different styles of handwriting on it. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in the episode that shows Greg and Rose’s relationship starting that Greg drives that fence down, and that he continues to tenaciously fight for Rose to really let him in, and talk to him honestly.

For a happier “honest Rose”, look at Rose in Lion 3: Direct To Video. Because that, I feel like, was a Rose who had finally let some of her walls down and was flourishing because of it. Even then, her attitude there betrays that same kind of worldliness that the unhappy glimpse of Rose in Story For Steven does.

Rose is someone who thinks about things deeply. She’s a commander, a tactician, and a leader. She’s someone who has incredible ability to spur revolution and incite energy and you don’t do that without being able to package and sell your ideas convincingly. And I think for a while before meeting Greg she sold herself as a perfect person who had no problems. As others before me have pointed out, Garnet becomes much more closed off when she inherits Rose’s leadership position after Steven’s birth- in Friend Ship she states that she tries to be a stabilizing rock for the team and we see in Keystone Motel that in some ways Garnet deliberately hides her issues from Pearl, Amethyst, and, early in the series, Steven.

Is it inconceivable that Garnet might’ve learned that from someone? That Rose might have refused to talk about the war and how it affected her for the benefit of being the leader that Pearl, Amethyst, and Garnet could look up to? That she may have had a hand in cultivating the idealized image of herself that Pearl holds onto so extensively after Rose’s passing?

Because here’s the thing. While we haven’t seen this happening in a flashback yet, we know that between We Need To Talk and the present, Greg heard about the war. A lot. Implicitly, he saw it- which, as he points out, he wasn’t there, but to me that would almost suggest Rose took him into her room and showed it to him.

At a point after We Need To Talk, Rose let her walls down and showed Greg some of what she was dealing with. And I feel like this is partially why Greg in the present timeline is much more concerned about magic and its dangers than his younger self. More than second-guessing his right to be there, Greg worries about his son, he worries about the situations involved, and he is very willing to wade into danger himself seemingly because he understands the importance of taking action. Never once does Greg suggest that magic should just sort itself out.

So, yeah, I find it hard to believe that simple, quick, almost automatic answer from Rose is genuine. She kind of has a track record of hiding things. Steven, whose character is largely driven by understanding, has suggested that Rose seems inaccessible to him- he doesn’t know how to feel about her.